tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-78728190108484266932017-08-11T11:27:34.322-04:00The Historical SocietyThe Historical Society group blog fosters conversations and debates and promotes scholarly outreach. The blog features short entries and reviews by and interviews with some of the leading historians of the English-speaking world.Randallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16755286304057000048noreply@blogger.comBlogger837125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7872819010848426693.post-45745795592404800162014-03-21T08:58:00.000-04:002014-03-21T08:58:47.841-04:00Latest issue of Historically Speaking Now OnlineRandall Stephens<br /><br />The latest issue of HS is now up on the <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/historically_speaking/toc/hsp.14.5.html">Project Muse site</a>.&nbsp; It is a longer issue than normal, featuring two forums, five essays, and four interviews.&nbsp; Readers might be especially interested in our forum on Geoffrey Parker’s <i>Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century</i> (Yale University Press, 2013), one of the most important history books of the last year.&nbsp; As Don Yerxa puts it in the <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/historically_speaking/v014/14.5.parker.html">intro to the forum</a>: "It has been widely heralded as an extraordinary scholarly achievement. Parker makes the case for a link between climate change and the worldwide catastrophe that occurred 350 years ago. We asked Parker to begin our forum with an account on the book’s long gestation. Then three prominent scholars, Kenneth Pomeranz, J.R. McNeill, and Jack Goldstone, comment on Global Crisis, followed by Parker’s rejoinder."<br /><br />This issue, as many of our readers know, also marks an important transition for HS.&nbsp; We are suspending publication for the remainder of 2014 as we forge a more sustainable operational framework. We are hopeful that some very promising developments will enable us to resume publishing a new and improved <i>Historically Speaking</i> in 2015.<br /><br /><b>TOC, <i>Historically Speaking</i> (November 2013) </b><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-EMMkX-7i2xc/Uyw2d3I5roI/AAAAAAAAF_I/M0JPS3RvxYY/s1600/HS_nov13.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-EMMkX-7i2xc/Uyw2d3I5roI/AAAAAAAAF_I/M0JPS3RvxYY/s1600/HS_nov13.jpg" height="400" width="310" /></a></div><div style="margin-left: 3em;"><br />"Silver and Segregation"<br />Wyatt Wells<br /><br />"Winston Churchill and the Literary History of Politics"<br />Jonathan Rose<br /><br />"Winston Churchill and Almighty God"<br />David Reagles and Timothy Larsen<br /><br />"Liberal Protestantism in 20th-Century America: An Interview with<br />David A. Hollinger"<br />Conducted by Randall J. Stephens<br /><br />"Catastrophe 1914: An Interview with Max Hastings"<br />Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa<br /><br />Digital versus Printed Historical and Literary Editions: A Forum<br /><br />"Television Is Not Radio with Pictures"<br />Holly Cowan Shulman<br /><br />"Pouring Old Editorial Wine into New Digital Bottles"<br />Constance Schulz<br /><br />"The Changing Production and Consumption of Historical and Literary Texts: The View from the Simms Initiatives"<br />David Moltke-Hansen<br /><br />"The Invention of the American Meal: An Interview with Abigail Carroll"<br />Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa<br /><br />"Global Crisis: A Forum The Genesis of Global Crisis" <br />Geoffrey Parker<br /><br />"Weather, War, and Welfare: Persistence and Change in<br />Geoffrey Parker’s Global Crisis" <br />Kenneth Pomeranz<br /><br />"Maunder Minimum and Parker Maximum"<br />J.R. McNeill<br /><br />"Climate Lessons from History"<br />Jack A. Goldstone<br /><br />"Response"<br />Geoffrey Parker<br /><br />"A Combat History of the Great War: An Interview with Peter Hart"<br />Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa<br /><br />"Jewish History and Education: A Review Essay"<br />Philip T. Hoffman<br /><br />"Töchter of Feminism: Germany and the Modern Woman Artist"<br />Diane Radycki</div>Randallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16755286304057000048noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7872819010848426693.post-89884912249561631382014-02-28T12:37:00.001-05:002014-03-01T07:10:48.313-05:00 Robin Hood and Remote Rule<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">British North America developed from a landscape of religions into a nation of races over the course of the eighteenth century.This process culminated in a hot, locked Philadelphia hall in 1787, but the lessons upon which the drafters drew reached back to the Reformation of the sixteenth century and earlier to Rome.<img alt="" border="0" height="231" src="https://ci4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/8W_Pef6YdrbTPg5tlMNqDwvU54e5jTfqgK3TqpXM-KwTPL6BFgKK9CWu7jiUNt38tEil0zatw_pkFJQ6CJ4jlkeJYm07fJdmS6iRuVE_psdhPG-RpJGqSdKYgcz9TUKA881AzfqVFo34_GdO5QV1s4NVQGsHypuLVfjdNiE01kuY4Nc6JBncD5EirjqrQwL6VU3_=s0-d-e1-ft#http://sites.google.com/a/elizabethlewispardoe.com/mystories/_/rsrc/1256490549225/histories/180px-Gaius_Cornelius_Tacitus.jpg" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; display: inline; float: left; margin: 4px 24px 12px 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" width="180" /></span></span><br /><br /><div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; display: inline ! important; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Americans had, after all, just rejected their inclusion in the British variant. </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">If they failed to grasp the significance of their success, Edward Gibbon’s&nbsp;</span><i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Decline and Fall of Rome,&nbsp;</i><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">David Hume’s</span><i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> <span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">History of England,</span></i><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">&nbsp;and the tales of Robin Hood</span><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; min-height: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AWhZ6RTEyUiqZGdyOWg5MmhfNTZjNGduc2Nneg&amp;hl=en#FOOTNOTE-1" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; color: #743399; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">1</a>&nbsp;</span></span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">served to remind them of the dangers of remote rule.</span></span></span></div><br /><br /><div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; display: inline ! important; margin: 0px 0px 24px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Early Modern Europe possessed two empires with established Protestant populations inhabiting borders under perpetual threat.</span>The Holy Roman Empire’s borderland Protestants included the Southwestern Germans of Wuerttemberg and the Rhineland-Palatinate, for whom “<i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">cuius regio, eius religio</i>” offered precious little protection from neighboring Catholic armies. The British Empire sent forth Scots to settle among and pacify the Catholics a few leagues away in Northeastern Ireland. These two groups moved away from their fraught locations on Europe’s bloodiest frontiers topopulate the so-called backcountry of eighteenth-century British North America from the Kennebec to the Altamaha.<a href="http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AWhZ6RTEyUiqZGdyOWg5MmhfNTZjNGduc2Nneg&amp;hl=en#FOOTNOTE-2" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; color: #743399; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; min-height: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">2</span></span></a></span></span></div><br /><a name='more'></a><br /><div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://sites.google.com/a/elizabethlewispardoe.com/mystories/histories/kopfbild_unesco.jpg?attredirects=0" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; color: #743399; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" height="110" src="https://ci3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/Ker54YjPqCscnxvjdx7a6JuNTXf41kkfGaHeGeuVC_njR8ssrgp6G89-qZZFfLbjsJs_sKDlgUgd2xZjlJO3XhPUXRn3n6SliQQgBHYSRFdWo0J7OKWINJnLaDE8NC-_UBHOEob6VqyUIL5xG1d6DSYoaeVGtyNREamFxUN944oEgVEi-iKyYhR0B6KPe_wjiQqxu5GTaYZb3EU=s0-d-e1-ft#http://sites.google.com/a/elizabethlewispardoe.com/mystories/_/rsrc/1256491958138/histories/kopfbild_unesco.jpg?height=110&amp;width=200" style="background-color: transparent; border: medium none; display: inline; float: right; margin: 4px 0px 12px 24px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" width="200" /></a></span></span><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"></div><div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The Germans, Scots, and Irish, in a multitude of hyphenated forms, created a cultural and military frontier in the new world as they had in the old. The German Swabs and Ulster Scots had a great deal in common. Both had theological roots in the ‘second’ or ‘radical’ Reformation of the 1570s. &nbsp;Southwest German’s Lutheranism was heavily influenced by Zwingli<a href="http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AWhZ6RTEyUiqZGdyOWg5MmhfNTZjNGduc2Nneg&amp;hl=en#FOOTNOTE-3" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; color: #743399; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; min-height: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">3</span></span></a>&nbsp;and Covenanters in Scotland and Ireland derived their beliefs from the Swiss reformer, Calvin, as well as Zwingli, as John Knox interpreted their theology.<a href="http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AWhZ6RTEyUiqZGdyOWg5MmhfNTZjNGduc2Nneg&amp;hl=en#FOOTNOTE-4" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; color: #743399; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; min-height: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">4</span></span></a>&nbsp;Both came from regions of Europe where radical Protestants lived cheek by jowl with counter-Reformation Catholics. In 1685 Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes. By 1688 French troops bathed the Palatinate in blood.Britain’s ‘Glorious Revolution’ in the same year may have peacefully secured a Protestant succession in England, but its new Protestant King, William, and Catholic claimant, James II, ensured that the Ireland suffered enough for all three British kingdoms combined.<a href="http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AWhZ6RTEyUiqZGdyOWg5MmhfNTZjNGduc2Nneg&amp;hl=en#FOOTNOTE-5" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; color: #743399; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; min-height: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">5</span></span></a>&nbsp;For both border populations, these traumas were but the latest horrors in litanies of loss wrought during centuries of constant crisis. Seeking escape, both landed on Atlantic shores with dreams of stability guaranteed by land-holding independence.<span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; min-height: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AWhZ6RTEyUiqZGdyOWg5MmhfNTZjNGduc2Nneg&amp;hl=en#FOOTNOTE-6" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; color: #743399; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">6</a></span></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; margin: 0px 0px 24px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><img alt="" height="136" src="https://ci5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/NdOsTpdTQ2hp2zsY4Uvu96UbF4LpCiC6KGUI9vfBvbnmyNTE2Q_Vm_Rhe4X5sFYZ-COQObo98pYi2Ma920TEgkVACotlfZrL7207rRHU1pC8mN4WXGHr_pvPrAtjHj_rRzmw6FtDd8yzR5bs_f4WSHqOb6EaE_G6PmTFXWKljXukcw85VKJOoql9Xq8g-GkmhlJ_v5OvPg=s0-d-e1-ft#http://sites.google.com/a/elizabethlewispardoe.com/mystories/_/rsrc/1256490108909/histories/sketchrobin.jpg?height=200&amp;width=154" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; display: inline; float: left; margin: 4px 24px 12px 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" width="105" />&nbsp;</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">In Europe, these ill-definied communities buffered their rulers’ borders from attack, but they also attacked their rulers.Luther’s condemnation of the South German’s Peasant’s Revolt of 1525, secured its infamy in historical memory.<a href="http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AWhZ6RTEyUiqZGdyOWg5MmhfNTZjNGduc2Nneg&amp;hl=en#FOOTNOTE-7" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; color: #743399; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; min-height: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">7</span></span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">&nbsp;The covenanter’s revolt in Scotland and the Catholic revolt in Ulster cost Charles I his head in 1642.</span><a href="http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AWhZ6RTEyUiqZGdyOWg5MmhfNTZjNGduc2Nneg&amp;hl=en#FOOTNOTE-8" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; color: #743399; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; min-height: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">8</span></span></a>&nbsp;The sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries created real and imagined bandits throughout Europe. A few real bandits possessed the noble motives of the fictionalized Robin Hood, whom Wilkesites adopted as their mascot on both sides of the Atlantic.<span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; min-height: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AWhZ6RTEyUiqZGdyOWg5MmhfNTZjNGduc2Nneg&amp;hl=en#FOOTNOTE-9" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; color: #743399; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">9</a></span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; line-height: 14px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">&nbsp;</span></span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; line-height: 14px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">All bandits, Eric Hobsbawm argues, thrived in the unruly borderlands: in the Roman, Holy Roman, and British Empires.</span><a href="http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AWhZ6RTEyUiqZGdyOWg5MmhfNTZjNGduc2Nneg&amp;hl=en#FOOTNOTE-10" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; color: #743399; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; min-height: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">10</span></span></a>&nbsp;Martin Luther drew the parallel with bandits in his tirade against the peasants wrecking havoc under the influence of Thomas Muenzer. “Like public highwaymen and murderers,” he raved, “It is right and lawful to slay at the first opportunity a rebellious person….”<a href="http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AWhZ6RTEyUiqZGdyOWg5MmhfNTZjNGduc2Nneg&amp;hl=en#FOOTNOTE-11" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; color: #743399; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; min-height: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">11</span></span></span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; line-height: 14px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://sites.google.com/a/elizabethlewispardoe.com/mystories/histories/hadrians_wall.png?attredirects=0" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; color: #743399; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" height="200" src="https://ci3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/Ys44yITLK3woEks16yY84urmreqD28xXCuxNvjF723ACOf2a8tnKx8SgiJqof6flDIQez9aE7Iwh5A7yDM1_RXFJY9vrNsuPaJgyqIe9IFPLNdCVhHCRu7plk4MGWlhEjyudtoL5ZAmcA1tzkQVy-KCWhaAZkjdZhqkWlhJrCSu3O2K_LcAuKpdXTHVrrEoG2cExKHe-eEDM=s0-d-e1-ft#http://sites.google.com/a/elizabethlewispardoe.com/mystories/_/rsrc/1256491483450/histories/hadrians_wall.png?height=200&amp;width=195" style="background-color: transparent; border: medium none; display: inline; float: right; margin: 4px 0px 12px 24px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" width="195" /></a>&nbsp;</span></span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; line-height: 14px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The linkage between these peoples in Europeans’ corporate imagination dated back at least to the Roman conquest of both “Upper Germany” and Britain.</span>&nbsp;The Romans built their most famous walls to keep out the populations (Der Limes for the Swabs and Hadrian’s Wall for the Scots) that British seaboard colonies invited into their midst. &nbsp;Those south-west Germans misnamed ‘Palatines’ and those from north-east Ireland ‘With No Name’<span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; min-height: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AWhZ6RTEyUiqZGdyOWg5MmhfNTZjNGduc2Nneg&amp;hl=en#FOOTNOTE-12" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; color: #743399; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">12</a>&nbsp;</span></span>had once shared the label ‘barbarian’ to the civilized rulers of Rome.“All ancient writers agree,” writes Hume in his widely read&nbsp;<i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">History of England</i><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">&nbsp;“in representing the first inhabitants of Britain as a tribe of the Gauls or Celtae, who populated that island from the neighboring continent.”&nbsp;</span>These Celts shared language, manners, government, and superstition in Hume’s estimation<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="144741b0da22e6c0__ftnref4" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"></a>.<a href="http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AWhZ6RTEyUiqZGdyOWg5MmhfNTZjNGduc2Nneg&amp;hl=en#FOOTNOTE-13" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; color: #743399; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; min-height: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">13</span></span></a> Even when a Roman colony, Gibbon thought the empire unable to “guard the maritime province against the pirates of Germany” leaving “independent and divided” Britons to fall prey to “rapine and destruction” when “the Saxons might sometimes join the Scots and the Picts in a tacit or express confederacy.”<span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; min-height: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AWhZ6RTEyUiqZGdyOWg5MmhfNTZjNGduc2Nneg&amp;hl=en#FOOTNOTE-14" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; color: #743399; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">14</a>&nbsp;</span></span>In Hume’s historical framework, after Rome fell, Germany became the prize in the medieval tug-o-war between the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope, while Scotland and Ireland played a similarly critical role in the Tudor-Stuart era rivalry between the French and English crowns.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="144741b0da22e6c0__ftnref7" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"></a><a href="http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AWhZ6RTEyUiqZGdyOWg5MmhfNTZjNGduc2Nneg&amp;hl=en#FOOTNOTE-15" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; color: #743399; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; min-height: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">15</span></span></a></span></span></div>Randallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16755286304057000048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7872819010848426693.post-31897208837939504022014-02-19T08:02:00.000-05:002014-02-19T08:02:42.553-05:00 When Virtù Courts VirtueElizabeth Lewis Pardoe<br /><br /><a href="http://sites.google.com/a/elizabethlewispardoe.com/mystories/_/rsrc/1256489850963/histories/austen.gif?height=200&amp;width=141" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; clear: right; color: #743399; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; margin-top: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"><img alt="" height="199" src="https://ci3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/HHpi7bM8UAG6ZiHuLdpC0oAbXLCHmpodHvrzpMA8ljdP9JHh4hnOctHdA_riAyL4nx8xPXs68U8OIg5SL87QurDymTTOCux4iQyh34rw3HNKTr4r_ztBjMRlV3m6rYLiKPmJZuA_PeJ83tnMT_8qi7cxK_lKqEpSLS3we9kSFMK8MJxNMSbY8K9Fdh3kfKgrXg=s0-d-e1-ft#http://sites.google.com/a/elizabethlewispardoe.com/mystories/_/rsrc/1256489850963/histories/austen.gif?height=200&amp;width=141" style="background-color: transparent; border: medium none; display: inline; float: left; margin: 4px 24px 12px 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" width="141" /></a><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-size: x-small; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"></span>I found my way to this topic via a peculiar trajectory that began along the Cam under the tutelage of Quentin Skinner, where the distinction between classical republican <i>virtù</i> and protestant Christian virtue first entered my consciousness.&nbsp; The hybridized <i>virtù</i>(e) that filled the political treatises of the American Revolution/War for Independence fascinated me but were not the centerpiece of my doctoral research.&nbsp; When I returned to Jane Austen as my entertainment while my second son nursed, I realized that the hybridization process took place on the pages of Miss Austen’s novels.<br /><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-size: x-small; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"></span>The historiography of the American Revolution nearly drowns in examinations of Republican motherhood and patricidal rage. Austen’s heroines need not kill their fathers. They are already dead (<i>Sense &amp; Sensibility</i>) or emasculated by poverty (<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=4FkVAAAAYAAJ&amp;dq=Sense+and+Sensibility&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;source=bn&amp;hl=en&amp;ei=wQDtSpjNHoeIMrr-oYQM&amp;sa=X&amp;oi=book_result&amp;ct=result&amp;resnum=11&amp;ved=0CDQQ6AEwCg#v=onepage&amp;q=&amp;f=false"><i>Pride &amp; Prejudice</i></a>, <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=3OHOUzhs6qQC&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=Northanger+Abbey&amp;ei=RLf1SruyKo3mMPTwxJUF#v=onepage&amp;q=&amp;f=false"><i>Northanger Abbey</i></a>, <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=EZ8Rd5IsjawC&amp;dq=Mansfield+Park&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=youe-bQC1y&amp;sig=A7dGR_w-tXTk4Qb154LT3qkHl2k&amp;hl=en&amp;ei=sbb1SurhL-Lk8AbXx_nzCQ&amp;sa=X&amp;oi=book_result&amp;ct=result&amp;resnum=17&amp;ved=0CEEQ6AEwEA#v=onepage&amp;q=&amp;f=false"><i>Mansfield Park</i></a>), frailty (<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=NT0PAgAACAAJ&amp;dq=Emma&amp;ei=Brf1StDRApm8M4SX1bMF"><i>Emma</i></a>), and vanity (<i>Persuasion</i>).&nbsp; It takes little imagination to envision Elinor Dashwood, <span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-size: x-small; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://sites.google.com/a/elizabethlewispardoe.com/mystories/histories/AbinJohn.jpg?attredirects=0" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #743399; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" height="121" src="https://ci5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/0vrEhIKiicZnZbKJcc9MTso_OrE0R1rlfLMGzexKtgmFgkgVeZ1SjC4rB0q0NoaGJ8MYJ3an3drdTQKB4u6_iOc89P_vrEVfVbRONbJRbh6JF9FpksT5SUTeBJO_thbTRsh2khoyXRGK3IxzVoYPq80q4SFByKx-R_L9MYf9fa-nn_dyWUiRQdzX_LPaAnPpyoVi=s0-d-e1-ft#http://sites.google.com/a/elizabethlewispardoe.com/mystories/_/rsrc/1256490965691/histories/AbinJohn.jpg?height=121&amp;width=200" style="background-color: transparent; border: none; display: inline; float: left; margin: 4px 24px 12px 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" width="200" /></a></span>Elizabeth Bennet, Catherine Moreland, Fanny Price, Emma Woodhouse, and Anne Elliot as the republican mothers of a future generation.&nbsp; In attributes they share much with the ultimate Republican mother as proven in her dual role as the United States’ first wife and mother to (failed) Presidents, Abigail Adams.&nbsp; They can hold their own in discussions of the lofty but are unafraid to engage in the lowly. Think of Abigail Adams mopping her floors with vinegar while her many children lay sick, and Anne Elliot caring for her injured nephew while his squeamish mother tends to her own nerves not his physical needs.&nbsp; When the <i>virtùous</i> Captain and Mrs. Wentworth set sail, I suspect their destination is the new republic on the other side of the Atlantic.<br /><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-size: x-small; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" border="0" height="200" src="https://ci3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/jeWCeSHA9IbVQ2wxLCaILiXLr4WGtZlxMsKpHZPlRuhMIPwxnJk9azkghd4Sg9HFGn_0msQiUk4bV3yBcTKYPNCK9RiDwRIjVVCubIlRiMTxAXcXA2guQ70XMo-3Jwi34kkby6qOuVDaNszdypy8XN8uKYhhb9zEnsXtWNtY0D5NGglpMhd04x5T-9B68gwzHdydRAlnv7I6BN1O=s0-d-e1-ft#http://sites.google.com/a/elizabethlewispardoe.com/mystories/_/rsrc/1256490863424/histories/TJ%202%20436X500.jpg?height=200&amp;width=174" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; display: inline; float: right; margin: 4px 0px 12px 24px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" width="174" /></span>Thomas Jefferson obsessed over <i>virtù</i>(e) and corruption in both the public and private spheres.&nbsp; Jefferson is remembered for his assiduous adherence to the necessity of landholding independence as a prerequisite for political <i>virtù</i>. He never deigned to fight in the colonies-cum-new republic’s wars though famously wrote on the worth of blood spilled for a <i>virtùous</i> cause.&nbsp;&nbsp; He is also remembered for his utter lapse in private virtue, bedding but never wedding a woman he considered his racial inferior.&nbsp;&nbsp; Jefferson was a last gasp of&nbsp; this double standard in the Americas.&nbsp; The widow’s of New Jersey had already become the first in Atlantic world to cast their votes in a simultaneous demonstration of both their <i>virtù</i>(e)s.&nbsp;<br /><br />Finally, I beg leave to indulge in some Whiggish analysis and imagine that William Jefferson Clinton’s presidency would have been very different indeed&nbsp; had Americans not come to accept Jane Austen’s definition of hybridized <i>virtù</i>(e) and applied it to men and women alike.<br /><br />____________<br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;">Sources: Linda Kerber, <i>Women of the Republic</i>; Mary Beth Norton, <i>Liberty’s Daughters</i>; and Jay Fleigelman, <i>Prodigals and Pilgrims</i>.</span>Randallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16755286304057000048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7872819010848426693.post-44732715913436033472014-02-06T07:34:00.003-05:002014-02-06T07:34:22.912-05:00Resources for Teaching History Over the last five years the HS blog has featured a variety of posts on history teaching, curriculum, group assignments, writing, and more.&nbsp; Interested in <a href="http://histsociety.blogspot.co.uk/2010/06/follow-up-on-josiah-quincy-house-class.html">creating a class website</a>?&nbsp; Wondering about how best to encourage <a href="http://histsociety.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=reading">students to read</a>?&nbsp; Need to engage students in a session about <a href="http://histsociety.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=historiography">history and historiography</a>?&nbsp; You can find what you're looking for here:<br /><br /><div style="margin-left: 3em;"><a href="http://histsociety.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=teaching">Teaching</a><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-jjhXtJ4sevU/UvOA6qk5Z3I/AAAAAAAAF8U/z2hNTAuVvMM/s1600/circle.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-jjhXtJ4sevU/UvOA6qk5Z3I/AAAAAAAAF8U/z2hNTAuVvMM/s1600/circle.jpg" height="316" width="320" /></a></div><br /><a href="http://histsociety.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Teaching%20Resources">Teaching Resources</a><br /><br /><a href="http://histsociety.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/History%20Classroom">History Classroom</a><br /><br /><a href="http://histsociety.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Writing%20History">Writing</a><br /><br /><a href="http://histsociety.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Assignments">Assignments</a><br /><br /><a href="http://histsociety.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Plagiarism">Plagiarism</a><br /><br /><a href="http://histsociety.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Grading">Grading </a><br /><br /><a href="http://histsociety.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Why%20Study%20History%3F">Why Study History</a><br /><br /><a href="http://histsociety.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Fieldtrips">Field Trips</a><br /><br /><a href="http://histsociety.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=curriculum">Curriculum</a><br /><br /><a href="http://histsociety.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=survey+courses">Survey Courses</a><br /><br /><a href="http://histsociety.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Letters%20of%20Recommendation">Recommendation Letters </a></div>Randallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16755286304057000048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7872819010848426693.post-69753232085969548922014-01-14T08:04:00.001-05:002016-01-06T14:44:57.586-05:00A Selfie of the YOLO GenerationSteven Cromack<br /><br />“Selfie” is the 2013 word of the year. In many ways, its definition encapsulates the identity of the generation that made it their own. The Millennials are rising. It is important that our teachers, school <br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>administrators, and college professors understand the students who sit before them in their classrooms. Of course, no generation is uniform. Based on the data, however, many Millennials members agree on certain ideas.<br /><br />Born between 1982 and 2003, we Millennials grew up in a rapidly changing world, and we were—and are—able to capture every moment of it through MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Vine. We are called “the Peter Pan” and “Me Generation.” We live by social media and have made it a part of every moment of our lives. According to our elders, we are rude because we cannot look up from our phones; lazy; refuse to grow up; and play too many video games. The Baby Boomers despise our attitudes and insist that because of us the country is going to hell in a hand basket. Our teachers claim that we are a generation of idiots falling behind the rest of the world because of our ability to “txt” and write in single letters—idk—and lament that words like “selfie,” “clutch,” “gucci,” and “swag” have become part of everyday vocabulary.<br /><br /><a name='more'></a>There are indicators, however, that we just may be the next great generation. In their book <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Millennials-Rising-Next-Great-Generation/dp/0375707190" target="_blank">Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation</a></i> Neil Howe and William Strauss outline the unique characteristics of the rising age group. Millennials, they claim, are “unlike any other youth generation in living memory. They are more numerous, more affluent, better educated, and more ethnically diverse . . . and destined to dominate the twenty-first century like today’s fading and ennobled G.I. generation dominated the twentieth” (4-5). <br /><br />Of all the generations before us, we are the most tolerant and accepting. In a 2005 study 60% of respondents between the ages 15 and 25 agreed with the statement “homosexuality is a way of life and should be accepted by society.” In comparison, of those over 57 surveyed, only 39% agreed with that statement. In a 2002 study 60% of Millennials surveyed believed that “immigrants today strengthen our country because of their hard work and talents.” In comparison, only 42% of those over 57 agreed with that statement. Many within our generation are independents with liberal inclinations, especially on social and economic issues. With that said, we overwhelmingly loathe the government and want nothing to do with it.<br /><br />That does not make us selfish, however. On the contrary, we are actually more selfless than the Baby Boomers. Forty-three percent (and rising) of our generation is committed to community service, something within our control. We believe that our future does not lie with the government, but with ourselves. <br /><br />As one Millennial blogger puts it: “We have been handed the world and it looks awful, and we have never felt so goddamn powerless . . . . The self is the only thing we have. Our own experience is the only thing on which we have complete authority, the only thing over which we have total control.” <br /><br />Sixteen percent of our generation is unemployed because 58% of managers won't hire us. In the meantime, we are going to live life, and if it means doing so from our parents’ basement, then so be it. Indeed, we have invented the acronym YOLO, or “you only live once.” #noregrets.Joseph Lucashttps://plus.google.com/105354394351388874296noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7872819010848426693.post-31658568682807910052014-01-10T07:00:00.000-05:002014-01-10T07:00:01.226-05:00Roundup: Digging up the Past <span style="color: white;"><span style="background-color: white;">. </span></span><br /><a href="http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/news/history-archaeology-news/ancestors-gurche2-vin/">"Ancient Ancestors Come to Life,"</a> <i>National Geographic</i>, January 3, 2014<br /><br />See our ancient ancestors come to life through paleoartist John Gurche's realistic human likenesses for the Smithsonian's Hall of Human Origins. <br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><object data="//www.youtube.com/v/oFrRHbgBitI?hl=en_US&amp;version=3" height="200" style="clear: right; float: right;" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="320"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><param name="src" value="//www.youtube.com/v/oFrRHbgBitI?hl=en_US&amp;version=3"><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true"></object></div>"The human story is really nothing short of the story of a little corner of the universe becoming aware of itself," says Gurche.<a href="http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/news/history-archaeology-news/ancestors-gurche2-vin/">&gt;&gt;&gt;</a><br /><br />Louise Iles, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25334430">"Year in digs: How 2013 looked in archaeology,"</a> BBC, December 31, 2013<br /><br />. . . . This year's research also gave us a glimpse into the private lives of our hominid cousins, reopening debates that might shed light on the evolution of our species.<br /><br />The first complete Neanderthal genome was published, at the same time showing inbreeding within Neanderthal groups as well as reports of interbreeding between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans.<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25334430">&gt;&gt;&gt;</a><br /><a name='more'></a><br />Joe Holleman, <a href="http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/st-louis-university-archeology-team-is-unearthing-irish-history/article_47fec2c1-4e15-5027-b2c7-1ab37ff0d581.html">"St. Louis University archeology team is unearthing Irish history,"</a> <i>St Louis Post-Dispatch</i>, January 2, 2014<br /><br />Thomas J. Finan, a history professor at St. Louis University, has been taking students to Ireland for archaeological work since 2004. Last summer, Finan and his band of 12 students made an important discovery — the remains of what appears to have been a major Irish settlement dating to about 1200.<a href="http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/st-louis-university-archeology-team-is-unearthing-irish-history/article_47fec2c1-4e15-5027-b2c7-1ab37ff0d581.html">&gt;&gt;&gt;</a><br /><br />Louis Charbonneau, <a href="http://in.reuters.com/article/2013/12/16/syria-crisis-un-archeology-idINDEE9BF0CV20131216">"UNESCO sounds alarm about illicit Syria archeology digs,"</a> Reuters, December 16, 2013<br /><br />The head of UNESCO sounded an alarm about widespread illegal archeological excavations across war-ravaged Syria on Friday, saying the U.N. cultural, education and science arm has warned auction houses, museums and collections about the problem.<a href="http://in.reuters.com/article/2013/12/16/syria-crisis-un-archeology-idINDEE9BF0CV20131216">&gt;&gt;&gt;</a><br /><br />Lindsay Peyton, <a href="http://www.chron.com/neighborhood/heights/news/article/Her-group-finds-artifacts-that-reveal-Texas-5072182.php">"Her group finds artifacts that reveal Texas history,"</a> <i>Houston Chronicle</i>, December 17, 2013 <br /><br />When the Texas Department of Transportation recently needed help sifting through a mountain of sand hiding hundreds of prehistoric human artifacts, staff archeologists knew exactly where to look.<br /><br />The Houston Archeological Society jumped to their aid, offering to search through the sand at the Dimond Knoll site that TxDOT discovered while paving the way for the Grand Parkway. And society members offered to transport the dirt to an adjacent property, allowing more time and more people to join the effort.<a href="http://www.chron.com/neighborhood/heights/news/article/Her-group-finds-artifacts-that-reveal-Texas-5072182.php">&gt;&gt;&gt;</a>Randallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16755286304057000048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7872819010848426693.post-7219133633083464412014-01-08T12:34:00.000-05:002014-01-08T13:44:33.466-05:00Live-Tweeting #AHA2014Craig Gallagher <br /><br />In anticipation of going to my first <a href="http://www.historians.org/annual-meeting">American Historical Association conference</a> this past weekend in Washington D.C., I sought out a range of senior colleagues who had attended past AHA meetings <a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lagaESV-uyE/Us2L2c9RqoI/AAAAAAAAF60/NeSI8Fvie4o/s1600/dc_twitter.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lagaESV-uyE/Us2L2c9RqoI/AAAAAAAAF60/NeSI8Fvie4o/s1600/dc_twitter.jpg" height="178" width="200" /></a>for advice on what to expect. As a third-year Ph.D. candidate who is about to start writing a dissertation, I was regularly advised that many aspects of the AHA meeting did not yet apply to me, such as the <a href="http://www.historians.org/annual-meeting/job-center">Job Center</a>, where interviews for academic positions are conducted, or the Book Exhibit where publishers meet with scholars and teachers to discuss manuscripts or books for use in the classroom.<br /><br />My first AHA, therefore, was largely confined to the scholarly panels (and, I should add as a brief aside, various receptions, where I shamelessly handed out business cards and tried to score five minutes of chat with some of my favorite scholars. I was mostly successful). I attended six different panels over the four days, enjoying some immensely and others not-so-much. On the whole, I was impressed with the range of questions posed by various luminaries in my field, and – especially in the Atlantic History panels I was most interested in – the sweeping state-of-the-field discussions most papers engendered. <br /><br /><a name='more'></a>But it turned out that physically attending those panels and listening to the presenters was only scratching the surface of what was offered by this year’s AHA. I made an early decision this year to live-tweet the panels I was attending so that scholars who couldn’t attend the conference could get a sense, at least, of what issues were being raised. For this purpose, as the AHA themselves recommended, I tweeted with the hashtag <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23AHA2014&amp;src=hash">#AHA2014</a> (which remains searchable).<br /><br />But as I sat there with my laptop, oftentimes the only person in the room not using pen and paper,&nbsp; frantically summarizing points raised via the game-changing medium of Tweetdeck (if you’re not acquainted with it, become so), I discovered that I was also attending almost every other panel that was happening concurrent to the one I was listening to.<br /><br />Where I had intended to provide a flavor of the conference proceedings for scholars unable to attend, I quickly found myself in dialogue with interested scholars actually present in D.C. but at another panel or professional development workshop (or even waiting for a job interview to start). Although they were mainly reading my shorthand summaries of points raised (far more eloquently) by the presenters I was listening to, they nonetheless sent me pertinent questions, comments or asked for clarifications which I did my best to provide.<br /><br />Indeed, it seemed as though every panel or workshop across the AHA program had a dedicated tweeter, whether on classical Rome or modern China, and especially the various digital history (<a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23dhist&amp;src=typd">#dhist</a>) workshops run this year by many younger scholars. This was all fitting as part of the AHA meeting featuring the inaugural <a href="https://aha.confex.com/aha/2014/webprogram/Session10816.html">Reception for History Bloggers and Twitterstorians</a>, which was well attended and stimulated very lively discussions.<br /><br />Could live-tweeting panels be the answer to the long-suffering conference-goer’s gripe about too many similar panels scheduled at the same time? I’d offer a cautious yes, as long as the tweeter is willing to be the only person in the room typing away furiously and is prepared to spend the intervening time between panels desperately searching for an outlet to charge their laptop or phone!<br /><br />But at the very least, it suggests that history conferences like the AHA in future are likely to take place in two separate but intimately related spaces: the real world of Washington D.C. on the verge a major snowstorm, and the ethereal, abbreviated, but undeniably lively world of the Twittersphere.<br /><br /><i>Craig Gallagher is a Ph.D. Candidate at Boston College, who is writing a dissertation about religion, trade and empire in the early modern British Atlantic world. He tweets at <a href="https://twitter.com/Gallacticos87">@Gallacticos87 </a></i>Randallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16755286304057000048noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7872819010848426693.post-22814077859519175212014-01-06T09:02:00.000-05:002014-01-06T09:03:03.499-05:00Snow DayElizabeth Lewis Pardoe<br /><br />I am as giddy as a child at the prospect of a snow day. Others fret about climate change when they see -40 windchills on the weather and can’t push the door open into a snowdrift. I think about Laura Ingalls <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wyCWBf20D3s/Usq3IKfq82I/AAAAAAAAAK8/mY3pBLuQKVU/s1600/Laura_Ingalls_Wilder.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wyCWBf20D3s/Usq3IKfq82I/AAAAAAAAAK8/mY3pBLuQKVU/s1600/Laura_Ingalls_Wilder.jpg" height="320" width="252" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Laura Ingalls Wilder</td></tr></tbody></table>Wilder’s memoirs and relish the prospect of stoking the fires of memory and imagination.<br /><br />Wilder’s books sparked my early interest in the past. Some of Wilder’s tales seemed similar to my own grandmother’s recollections of learning and teaching in a one room school house. My grandmother had a comparatively stable life on a comparatively prosperous farm in Illinois. &nbsp;Laura followed Pa Ingalls from Wisconsin West in a series of tentative land claims. My mother read the stories aloud at bedtime. My father would pass through and groan every time Pa uprooted his family and chased further west in pursuit of a half-baked dream. I didn’t need the <i><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/08/10/090810crat_atlarge_thurman?currentPage=all" target="_blank">New Yorker</a> </i>to tell me Pa Ingalls was not the saint his daughter imagined him to be. &nbsp;Even as a child, I couldn’t stomach the <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071007/?ref_=nv_sr_1" target="_blank">television version </a>of Wilder's tales. Michael Landon’s Pa was so angelic that the actor needed no adaptation to his performance when he moved on to play an angel in <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086730/?ref_=nv_sr_1" target="_blank">Highway to Heaven</a></i>. I craved the bits of terrifying realism that remained in the prose and faded from the screen.<br /><br /><a name='more'></a>My favorite moments in the memoirs involved the Ingalls family hunkered down for fearsome but intimate winters. <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Little-House-Woods-Ingalls-Wilder/dp/0060264306/ref=wp_bs_1_B00CJL4DYW_hardcover" target="_blank">Little House in the Big Woods</a></i> featured maple syrup drizzled on snow cakes that still make my mouth water. <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0064400026/ref=rdr_ext_tmb" target="_blank">Little House on the Prairie</a></i> offered the enduring image of Mr. Edwards making in through a blizzard to deliver Santa’s gifts to the Ingalls girls. During the heavy snows of the last week in Chicago, I have thought often of how Pa strung a rope between the house and the barn so he could find his way between them in a white out. I don’t need a rope quite yet, but I am glad no animals need feeding in my garage.<br /><br />As my family gathers round the fire to wait out a negative forty-four degree windchill, I imagine the Ingall’s envy at our well-insulated walls and well-stocked pantry. We don’t need Almazo to save us from starvation during <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0064400069/ref=rdr_ext_tmb" target="_blank">The Long Winter</a></i>. I’m fortunate not only compared to Laura but compared to most of humanity past and present. I know that. A snow day drives that home.<br /><div><br /></div>Joseph Lucashttps://plus.google.com/105354394351388874296noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7872819010848426693.post-45015508960705949072014-01-02T09:14:00.002-05:002014-01-02T18:49:51.675-05:00In Praise of (Electronic) SerendipityElliot Brandow<br /><br />Old books smell delicious, apparently like a combination of <a href="http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/smartnews/2013/06/that-old-book-smell-is-a-mix-of-grass-and-vanilla/" target="_blank">grass and vanilla</a>. Browsing the stacks offers us a chance not only to enjoy the lovely aroma but also to stumble upon that fragrant book we didn't know existed, or that we wanted, but that is just the one we needed! Ah, serendipity! It <br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SMg4b5ZbY2U/UsVzWYPkGsI/AAAAAAAAAKs/UXD6-RmTZU4/s1600/Sterling_Memorial_Library_stacks.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SMg4b5ZbY2U/UsVzWYPkGsI/AAAAAAAAAKs/UXD6-RmTZU4/s400/Sterling_Memorial_Library_stacks.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University.</td></tr></tbody></table>consistently tops, or nearly tops, the list of 20th-century library features we sorrowfully mourn. As we move ever-increasingly toward electronic-focused library collections, it seems we'll have to forgo this feature and pleasure of physical browsing.<br /><br />Roger Schonfeld recently posed the question in <a href="http://www.sr.ithaka.org/blog-individual/stop-presses-monograph-headed-toward-e-only-future" target="_blank">his excellent analysis</a> of the landscape of electronic monographs: "given that there is no hope for many libraries of recreating the single-site book collection for browsing, are there other steps that can be taken to re-establish opportunities for serendipitous discovery in the emerging environment?"<br /><br />But electronic browsing and stumbling just can't compete with searching, right? The war between a browsable <a href="http://dir.yahoo.com/" target="_blank">Yahoo Directory</a> and Google Search is long over: &nbsp;Google won. And library catalog systems and databases have been riding Google's coattails since, emphasizing ever simpler single search boxes, relegating advanced features and browsing to the corners of the screen, or removing them entirely.<br /><br /><a name='more'></a>But, electronic browsing doesn't have to mean print-directory surrogates. There are many examples of innovative electronic discovery design that can help you stumble upon something you didn't know you needed. You don't have to start with a search term at Zappos, for instance. Just select your foot size and it will present you with a list of what's available, then narrow by facet (those clickable categories on the left). The interface allows you to imagine a shoe store organized in any number of schemes: by designer, by season, by color, by price. You are no longer limited to one main organizational structure.<br /><br />Multiple organizational schemes are a key advantage of electronic serendipity. The browsing we enjoy in physical libraries is primarily based on subject categorization of the material. But electronic browsing isn't restricted to this single attribute, it offers many new possible ways to organize and reorganize a collection. We could browse by <a href="http://innovis.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/Research/BohemianBookshelf" target="_blank">book jacket color</a> (don't laugh, many librarians have heard that request at the reference desk from time to time). We could browse by frequency of use, as Harvard's <a href="http://librarylab.law.harvard.edu/blog/stack-view/" target="_blank">Stack View</a> does. The newly formed Digital Public Library of America has not only been creating an interface that unifies many U.S. digital collections, but also encouraging the creation of new ways to explore those collections, including browsing <a href="http://dp.la/map" target="_blank">geographically</a>, <a href="http://dp.la/timeline" target="_blank">temporally</a>, and even by matching collections against any text of your choice--witness the <a href="http://serendipomatic.org/" target="_blank">Serendip-o-matic</a>.<br /><br />Some of these might be novelties and proof of concepts, but I can think of numerous cases where browsing offers a more effective experience than search. <a href="http://www.oldmapsonline.org/" target="_blank">Old Maps Online</a>, a collaboration between the University of Portsmouth, UK and Klokan Technologies, is one of my favorites. Instead of searching for historical maps by place names, the interface allows you to navigate spatially, the site continually refreshing a visual list of historical maps that coincide with your current view of the world. The maps are drawn from numerous key collections including the British Library, Harvard, New York Public Library, and the Rumsey collection. It also allows you to narrow by time period with a simple sliding bar, and then jump to the full images of the digitized maps at their home collections.<br /><br />Recommendation engines, like those of Amazon, Netflix, and YouTube, leverage your personal (and our collective) purchasing and viewing history to offer more material and could also be considered a form of electronic browsing. Here is serendipity by algorithm. If you liked that Howard Zinn video, perhaps you might like this one with Noam Chomsky. Many library systems are now trying to utilize this technique as well: if you liked that article you might also be interested in this one, or you might care to read this author who wrote a critique of the book you're viewing. Reading and research social networks like <a href="http://www.librarything.com/" target="_blank">LibraryThing</a> and <a href="http://www.mendeley.com/" target="_blank">Mendeley</a> leverage their community bases to offer you more material based on your current research. And, of course, broader social networks like Twitter offer a platform to discover new material and often to interact right with its creator.<br /><br />Some might argue that serendipity implies more chance, a more random process than this type of computer-driven or human-curated selection. But there really is nothing random about the way library stacks are organized. They are designed according to a clear set of rules to facilitate this type of browsing. The truth is, serendipitous browsing has always been by design. And if we want to reestablish opportunities for serendipitous discovery in the emerging digital environment (and build exciting new ones), we will need to thoughtfully design them first.<br /><br />A loss of effective physical browsing is inevitable as we now live in a bifurcated electronic and print world. If you only browse the stacks, you'll miss all of our fantastic licensed and free digital collections (and of course, you're limiting yourself to what is in your specific library, happens to not be checked-out, and is located in that corner of the building, as Brian Mathews <a href="http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/theubiquitouslibrarian/2013/06/25/haystacks-vs-algorithms-is-scanning-the-stacks-for-pretty-books-really-the-best-research-strategy/" target="_blank">points out</a>). For a while libraries crudely tried to accommodate our hybrid collections by inserting dummy foam placeholders on the shelf where the electronic version had replaced the print--remember those? But the real opportunity lies in the reverse: building new and exciting possibilities for electronic browsing that still incorporate physical volumes while taking advantage of the digital environment.<br /><br />Electronic serendipity can cross boundaries of library and vendor ownership, availability, material type, and it can offer unlimited methods of organization and exploration of the same material. Our progression to electronic research doesn't have to mean one and only one thing: the single search box. We can build many new methods to stumble and browse through material electronically, accommodating different learning styles and ways of thinking about the material, and offering multiple opportunities to stumble upon just the item you didn't know you wanted. Now if we could only get our iPads to emit <a href="http://www.steidl.de/flycms/de/paper-passion/0714315960.html" target="_blank">old book smell</a> while we do it.Joseph Lucashttps://plus.google.com/105354394351388874296noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7872819010848426693.post-24302318598599642202013-12-23T08:42:00.000-05:002013-12-23T08:45:03.431-05:00Io Saturnalia!—The Roots of Christmas<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:OfficeDocumentSettings> <o:AllowPNG/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings></xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves>false</w:TrackMoves> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing> <w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing> <w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery> <w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:DontAutofitConstrainedTables/> <w:DontVertAlignInTxbx/> <w:UseFELayout/> </w:Compatibility> </w:WordDocument></xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" LatentStyleCount="276"> </w:LatentStyles></xml><![endif]--> <!--[if gte mso 10]><style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} </style><![endif]--> <!--StartFragment--> <div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">Steven Cromack</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-0GYZ3X_Ko8U/Urg8s22gqII/AAAAAAAAAKc/rRhXKS9XCJE/s1600/Constantine_I_Hagia_Sophia.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-0GYZ3X_Ko8U/Urg8s22gqII/AAAAAAAAAKc/rRhXKS9XCJE/s400/Constantine_I_Hagia_Sophia.jpg" width="390" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Emperor Constantine I. Detail of the mosaic in Hagia Sophia.</td></tr></tbody></table>Christmas is a fascinating holiday, and one that has been two thousand years in the making. Christmas today is the confluence of ancient traditions, Constantine Christianity, and American capitalism. The roots of the holiday lie not in the birth of a deity, but with the Roman festival of Saturnalia; it was the </div>Emperor Constantine who made the day about “Christ’s mass.” <br /><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The Punic Wars made some Romans very wealthy and drastically increased the number of slaves. As wealthy tyrants battled for control, many plebeians yearned for equality, identity, as well as an end to envy and despair. Out of their misery came the annual celebration known as Saturnalia. “Io Saturnalia” was a shout that embodied the reign of Saturn, a time during which there were bountiful harvests and universal plenty. The Greek satirist Lucian recorded a conversation between Cronus, known as Saturn by the Romans, and his priest about the holiday celebrated between December 17 and 25:</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i>Drinking and being drunk, noise and games and dice, appointing of kings and feasting of slaves, singing naked, clapping of tremulous hands, an occasional ducking of corked faces in icy water—such are the functions over which I preside.</i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i></i><br /><i></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i></i></div><a name='more'></a>In addition to drunken debauchery, the Romans numbed the pain of inequality by forcing themselves to give gifts. Drinking, noise, games, caroling, and giving gifts are all part of the Christmas tradition.<br /><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">By the 4th Century, the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and spent his reign trying to make Christianity the official religion of the Empire. In an attempt to convert the masses, he chose December 25 as the birthdate of Jesus with the hope that celebrating the birth of the deity would attract the pagans by absorbing the festival of Saturnalia. Throughout the Middle Ages, Christmas was celebrated with partying, gift giving, and drunkenness. In many cases, Church officials oversaw and encouraged the festivities.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">This is why the Puritans hated the holiday with every fiber of their being. In his book <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Battle-Christmas-Stephen-Nissenbaum/dp/0679740384" target="_blank">The Battle for Christmas</a></i>, Stephen Nissenbaum shows how Christmas changed from a holiday of drunkenness into the quintessential American holiday. The Reverend Increase Mather of Boston declared that the only reason people celebrated the holiday on December 25 was that “the Heathen’s Saturnalia was at that time kept in Rome, and they were willing to have those Pagan Holidays metamorphosed into Christian ones.”&nbsp;</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><br /><!--EndFragment-->Joseph Lucashttps://plus.google.com/105354394351388874296noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7872819010848426693.post-69231419348033547962013-12-20T08:04:00.004-05:002013-12-20T08:07:13.985-05:00Was Santa White? Heather Cox Richardson<br /><br />Pundits have sunk their teeth into a fight recently over whether or not Santa was white. After Fox News commentator Megyn Kelly declared Santa’s whiteness was a given, some called up the history of the original St. Nicholas (the patron saint of scholars, as well as children, by the way) to point out that the <a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Z5illmK0lgc/UrRAPvnO0jI/AAAAAAAAAKM/vYE_z1v-zfg/s1600/Santa.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Z5illmK0lgc/UrRAPvnO0jI/AAAAAAAAAKM/vYE_z1v-zfg/s640/Santa.png" width="449" /></a>historical figure was Greek and therefore probably not light-skinned. Others have responded by noting that “Santa” is a universal and timeless figure who should not be bound by any physical characteristics.<br /><br />But there is a different story worth noting in this odd debate. In fact, America has its own, very specific version of “Santa” who arrived during a particular moment in American history. That moment was the 1880s, a time when the nation appeared to be reaching some kind of healing after the deep wounds of the Civil War.<br /><br />By the 1880s, Americans North, South, and West, had reached a political equilibrium, and that calm appeared to be driving a healthy economy. Politicians had ceased to fight over reconstruction. Northerners had come to accept that white Democrats would control the South; northern leaders turned to new western territories to make up the electoral votes they needed to continue to hang onto national power.<br /><br />After a terrible financial crash in 1873, the economy had begun to pick up again by 1878, and by 1880, Americans were feeling flush and optimistic again. They began to celebrate significant events with parties and gifts. Weddings were no longer small affairs in someone’s front parlor; now they were elegant occasions in a decorated church with a reception afterward. For the first time, parents held parties for their child’s birthday, and those invited brought gifts for the guest of honor. Thanksgiving became a major holiday, marked with feasts of turkeys, ducks, or geese.<br /><br /><a name='more'></a>Nothing showed this change more clearly than the arrival in 1881 of cartoonist Thomas Nast’s iconic Santa. Printed in <i>Harper’s Weekly</i> before Christmas that year, the image was one of American prosperity. Santa was fat, warmly dressed, and smiling. He carried an armful of children’s toys, including a belt with a buckle embossed with the letters “US.”<br /><br />As Nast’s Santa showed, the new prosperity was uniquely American.<br /><br />But the success Nast celebrated was uniquely American in a negative sense, too. It belonged only to the sort of people who read <i>Harper’s Weekly</i>: white, well-off, and well-represented in government. These were the nation’s new white-collar workers, middle men for the new corporations. They, and their wives and children, had more money and more time than Americans had ever had before. They had time to plan parties for their children, and to tell them stories of a well-fed man who would give them toys for Christmas—just because they were loved. These men were secure. Government economic policies guaranteed that the booming economy would continue to put money into their pockets, enabling them to continue to coddle their children (who would go on to be the first generation to go through high school and then college).<br /><br />But most Americans did not share this prosperity. In the 1880s industrial factories were growing while workers fell behind. Wages dropped and working conditions deteriorated. Farmers, too, were ground into poverty as overproduction depressed the prices of farm commodities. The economic dislocation of the era was terrible for white workers and farmers, but adding racial and ethnic discrimination into the mix made the lives of most African Americans, immigrants, and Indians horrific. At the same time, Congress sternly refused to consider any policies that might help these Americans. Living in dirt poverty, working when they could, their only experience with the prosperity of the 1880s was being blamed for their inability to participate in it. There was no jolly Santa Claus to bring toys to the children of southern sharecroppers, Polish steelworkers, Chinese laundrymen, or reservation-bound Lakota and Cheyenne.<br /><br />Thomas Nast’s American Santa was indeed white. But that’s not something we should celebrate.<br /><div><br /></div>Joseph Lucashttps://plus.google.com/105354394351388874296noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7872819010848426693.post-53467102986388501152013-12-12T08:44:00.000-05:002013-12-12T08:51:48.633-05:00Ice Boxes vs. RefrigeratorsJonathan Rees<br /><br />I’ve written previously <a href="http://histsociety.blogspot.com/2013/09/information-overload-historians-edition.html" target="_blank">here</a>&nbsp;about the good and bad sides of suddenly being able to access the world’s biggest libraries through <a href="http://books.google.com/" target="_blank">Google Books</a>&nbsp;when you have a <a href="http://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/ecom/MasterServlet/GetItemDetailsHandler?iN=9781421411064&amp;qty=1&amp;viewMode=1&amp;loggedIN" target="_blank">research project </a>that you’d like to finish someday. Another Google experiment that debuted while I was working on <i>Refrigeration Nation</i> was <a href="https://books.google.com/ngrams" target="_blank">Google Ngrams</a>.<br /><br />Ngrams, if you don’t know about them, chart the frequency of words or phrases as they appeared in volumes scanned by the Google Books project against the years that those books were published. (See <a href="http://histsociety.blogspot.com/2013/11/taking-googles-ngram-for-spin.html" target="_blank">Eric Schultz's post</a> from last month.) Yes, it is incredibly easy to lose several hours playing with this research tool. Luckily for me, I already knew what I wanted to chart as soon as I heard of it:<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fcPlPOzLQQ4/Uqm7tTxafpI/AAAAAAAAAJ8/oSjuHEUYOzE/s1600/iceboxes+v.+Refrigerators.tiff" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="161" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fcPlPOzLQQ4/Uqm7tTxafpI/AAAAAAAAAJ8/oSjuHEUYOzE/s400/iceboxes+v.+Refrigerators.tiff" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">CLICK FOR LARGER IMAGE</td></tr></tbody></table><br />That is the chart for “ice box” vs. “refrigerator.” (For what it’s worth, <a href="https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=icebox%2C+refrigerator&amp;year_start=1800&amp;year_end=2000&amp;corpus=15&amp;smoothing=3&amp;share=&amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2Cicebox%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Crefrigerator%3B%2Cc0" target="_blank">icebox</a> [one word] looks almost identical.) What I really appreciate about that chart is that it basically illustrates something that my research already told me: before the electric household refrigerator came along, “ice boxes” were called “refrigerators.” Before explaining that statement a little better, let me define terms. While often used interchangeably with the word “refrigerator” by people over sixty, an ice box in the historical sense refers to a box with ice in it designed to keep perishable food fresh. The first ice boxes were made by carpenters in the 1840s, designed to take advantage of something new in American life: the regular household delivery of large blocks of ice that could be obtained daily in large cities and even small ones. Now, instead of going to market every day for your vegetables or fresh meats, consumers could buy for more than one day of meals at once, and keep the extra food in their ice box.<br /><br /><a name='more'></a>While incredibly convenient, ice boxes had their drawbacks. For example, you couldn’t open the door to your ice box all that often, or else the ice in it would melt too fast. Ice boxes were also hell to clean, particularly as ice cut from lakes and ponds in the early days of the ice industry often had natural sediment in it. If the smell of any food permeated the wood inside and got into the insulation, the whole appliance would become worthless. Also, if you kept the wrong products together in an ice box (butter and fish, for example) one would often end up smelling like the other.<br /><br />Nevertheless, Americans gradually warmed to the ice box.* You can see that in the gradual increase in frequency of the use of the term refrigerator in that Ngram, especially after 1880 as the insulation became better and refrigerator companies began to mass-produce them for the first time. How do I know that they don’t mean “refrigerator” like the one in your kitchen now? They hadn’t been invented yet.<br /><br />But while the first even remotely successful electric household refrigerator didn't debut until 1915, inventors were working on them at least a decade earlier because of the failings of the ice box as described above. This led to a need to differentiate the electric household refrigerators that they aspired to create from the useful but annoying boxes that so many people had in their kitchens at that time. &nbsp;Hence, the coining of the word “ice box.”<br /><br />The prime period for the growth of electric household refrigerators in the United States was the 1920s. That was when refrigerator producers gradually settled on a new refrigerant, Freon, and created a mechanism that was both reliable and quiet enough for household use. Refrigerators were one of the few goods for which sales actually increased during the Great Depression, as their value over the ice box in terms of convenience and effectiveness was just that clear. Based on my research, the ice box essentially disappeared during the 1950s as electric household refrigerators became so cheap and the country so prosperous that basically anybody could afford them. When that happened, the use of the &nbsp;word “ice box” declined with the appliance that it represented.<br /><br />Is a Google Ngram scientific? &nbsp;Of course, not. That’s why I didn’t put it in my book. Is a Google Ngram good enough for a blog post? Of course it is, which is why I just wrote this. Trust me, the actual research squares with this interpretation. If you don’t believe me, then buy <a href="http://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/ecom/MasterServlet/GetItemDetailsHandler?iN=9781421411064&amp;qty=1&amp;viewMode=1&amp;loggedIN" target="_blank">my book</a>&nbsp;and see for yourself.<br /><br />* Yes, bad puns are inevitable when discussing refrigeration of any kind. Why do you ask?Joseph Lucashttps://plus.google.com/105354394351388874296noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7872819010848426693.post-37091779217653876852013-12-11T08:00:00.000-05:002013-12-11T08:00:01.834-05:00Podcast: David Gleeson on the Irish in the Confederacy Randall Stephens<br /><br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8_khSNzaJOw/UqdDtWI1hyI/AAAAAAAAF6Q/Qn8c-4p1-AQ/s1600/greengrey.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8_khSNzaJOw/UqdDtWI1hyI/AAAAAAAAF6Q/Qn8c-4p1-AQ/s200/greengrey.jpg" width="130" /></a>In 2013 the University of North Carolina Press published David T. Gleeson's <a href="http://uncpress.unc.edu/books/t-7613.html"><i>The Green and the Gray: The Irish in the Confederate States of America</i></a>.&nbsp; It is&nbsp; a sprawling study that is already receiving high praise from historians and journalists.&nbsp; In the <a href="http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2013/09/27/book-review-the-green-and-gray-the-irish-confederate-states-america-david-gleeson/WGJq2rHSzifoYWKK98WJ5L/story.html"><i>Boston Globe</i></a> Michael Kenney writes "As his analysis unfolds, there is much that will surprise, perhaps even unsettle, Boston readers familiar with the abolitionists, the Massachusetts 54th, and the summertime encampments of reenactors. Gleeson looks at the role of Irish-Americans in the Southern debate over slavery, in the Confederate Army, on the homefront, and in the aftermath of the defeat." Over at the <a href="http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/pioneering-work-on-the-irish-of-the-confederacy-1.1569455"><i>Irish Times </i></a>Myles Dungan seems to agree. "Gleeson goes well beyond the merely anecdotal," says Dungan. &nbsp; Gleeson conveys "a sense of what it was to be an Irish immigrant in the southern states that formed the Confederacy between 1861 and 1865."<br /><br />David Gleeson is no stranger to the subject.&nbsp; He has been writing and teaching on 19th century history, the South, and the Civil War for many years now.&nbsp; A reader in history at <a href="http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/sass/about/humanities/history/staff/dtgleeson/">Northumbria University</a> he is the editor of <a href="http://www.sc.edu/uscpress/books/2010/3908.html"><i>The Irish in the Atlantic World</i> </a>(University of South Carolina Press, 2010) and the author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Irish-South-1815-1877-David-Gleeson/dp/0807849685"><i>The Irish in the South, 1815-1877</i></a> (University of North Carolina Press, 2001). <br /><br />In the interview embedded below<i>, </i>I speak with David about researching and writing<i> The Green and the Grey</i>.&nbsp; David also talks about the role of memory in the post Civil War South and discusses the ways that his work fits into the wider field of southern and Civil War history.<br /><br /><iframe frameborder="no" height="166" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/124172301&amp;color=ff6600&amp;auto_play=false&amp;show_artwork=false" width="100%"></iframe>Randallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16755286304057000048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7872819010848426693.post-52938651140264498022013-12-10T08:18:00.000-05:002013-12-12T08:27:12.745-05:00George Washington Gets a 360Eric Schultz<br /><br />The annual review can be an uncomfortable event, but a 360-Degree Performance Review (the “360”) is one of the more harrowing proceedings that can befall a professional, business or academic. In a 360 you are asked to grade yourself against a series of attributes, everything from ethics to leadership to <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-eNBcIfhISjQ/UqcTt4z0dpI/AAAAAAAAAJs/EQRTV9CSSCQ/s1600/Stuart-george-washington-constable-1797.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-eNBcIfhISjQ/UqcTt4z0dpI/AAAAAAAAAJs/EQRTV9CSSCQ/s400/Stuart-george-washington-constable-1797.jpg" width="312" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Gilbert Stuart's 1797 portrait of George Washington</td></tr></tbody></table>listening skills and coaching. Then, everyone in your “ecosystem” gets a crack at you, sometimes anonymously. This means your boss, often your boss’s boss or peers, your own peers and subordinates, and then some sampling of customers and vendors. Scores are averaged, and then you’re ready (or not) to talk with your boss about why you think your “collaboration with others” is an “8” while the 360 consensus shows it’s a “4.”<br /><br />A good 360—and there is such a thing, when done well—will reinforce your positives and give you additional incentive to fix the things you generally knew were broken anyway. A traumatic 360, however, can disclose huge “holes” in your game, which quite often turn out to be the very things that are keeping you from being effective, or promoted. 360s are not done every year but, like a colonoscopy (not to put too fine a point on it), are appropriate for the occasional gut-check.<br /><br />A month ago I was asked to meet with a group of senior executives who were about to receive the results of their first 360. This was a strong group who already knew themselves well, but there couldn’t help but be some anxiety. I was asked to talk specifically about my experiences with the tool—I’d been through a few—and try to put the practice in context as just another device that managers use to improve. My 360s were traumatic but positive: I learned that I never shined my shoes (at one extreme), that I was perceived as giving up too quickly on managers who failed (a gaping blind-spot in my game that I tried hard to repair), and that I should “be myself, but not too much myself”—the best piece of advice I ever got, and one I occasionally impart to others.<br /><br /><a name='more'></a>As I was preparing for my presentation, I was also reading Gordon Wood’s <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Revolutionary-Characters-What-Founders-Different/dp/0143112082" target="_blank">Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different</a></i>, and was positively struck by the chapter on George Washington. &nbsp;The most enigmatic of the Founding Fathers, Washington seemed to me, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s wonderful description, as having been “born with his clothes on, and his hair powdered, and made a stately bow on his first appearance in the world.” In other words, what could possibly be wrong with the greatest leader in American history? Yet, as I read through the chapter and saw the criticism mount, I began to wonder: What if Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, and others had reviewed Washington? What would George Washington’s 360 look like?<br /><br />And more to the point for my audience, how might he have responded to it?<br /><br />The positives are easy: Washington epitomized everything the Revolutionary generation prized in its leaders. He was internationally recognized as a man of character and virtue. He was known to have inordinate modesty and be a great listener (with “the gift of silence”). He actively sought advice, especially as he tried to define the role of the president. Unlike Jefferson, Washington was a talented general manager of his plantation. He also knew what he did not know, working closely with Jefferson and Knox on issues, but leaving Hamilton to wrestle with the economy. In all, Washington was considered extraordinarily gallant and dignified. When as a victorious general he presented his sword to Congress and retired to Mt. Vernon, Washington stunned the European world, which assumed he would maintain his army and take over the country. This was truly the sign of a classical hero, to act in ways ordinary men did not. (I could not help but compare him these past few days to Nelson Mandela, who also stunned the world by acting unlike an ordinary man.)<br /><br />Yet, this is a 360, and everyone gets their crack. Some believed Washington’s hesitancy was shyness, not characteristic of greatness. John Adams, known perhaps for his lack of shyness, found Washington to be a little over the top, “the best actor of presidency we have ever had.” He could feel the myth forming before his eyes, writing, “And then Franklin smote the ground and up rose George Washington, fully dressed and astride a horse! Then the three of them, Franklin, Washington and the HORSE, proceeded to win the entire revolution single-handedly!”<br /><br />Jefferson found his boss, for all of his leadership skills, to be far too thin-skinned, taking attacks to heart “more than any person I ever yet met with.” Worse still, Jefferson did not find Washington to be as intellectually gifted as those around him, saying "His mind was great and powerful, without being of the very first order.” Ouch.<br /><br />And then there was Hamilton, 5’7” and 26 years old with a hair-trigger temper (and twelve duels to prove it). &nbsp;Being aide-de-camp to the 6’2”, 45-year-old supreme commander didn’t slow Hamilton down. Early in 1781 Washington expressed some anger at Hamilton’s ten-minute delay in presenting himself, saying ever-so-mildly, “I must tell you Sir that you treat me with disrespect.” Hamilton resigned on the spot. Washington had to work very hard to patch things up, which he eventually did. Still, it would not surprise Washington to find on his 360 the criticism that he was disrespectful of subordinates.<br /><br />Last came the political attacks, epitomized in the mid-1790s by none other than Thomas Paine, who accused Washington of “cold and unmilitary conduct” during the Revolution. “You slept away your time in the field, till the finances of the country were completely exhausted, and you have but little share in the glory of the final event.” He went on to charge Washington with ingratitude, vanity, and a character that was “chameleon-colored.”<br /><br />Below is a quick summary of Washington’s 360. <br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mMDkyuSu3eI/UqcTAV9QjdI/AAAAAAAAAJk/iTWJQK4LOfA/s1600/George+Washington+360.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mMDkyuSu3eI/UqcTAV9QjdI/AAAAAAAAAJk/iTWJQK4LOfA/s640/George+Washington+360.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />What to make of this? Needless to say, we had a fascinating discussion, arriving at a few tentative conclusions. And, since it is coming up on the season of reviews for all of us, I share them with you here:<br /><br />1. If the greatest leader in American history could be bluntly criticized by those around him, you will be too. There’s no escape, so don’t even try.<br /><br />2. Note the positives. Celebrate your strengths.<br /><br />3. Embrace the negatives. Make something good of every single criticism. “Disrespectful of subordinates?” Undoubtedly Washington would have known who wrote that. He easily could have dismissed it. What he appeared to do, however, was recognize that fiery Alexander needed special mentoring and lots of tender loving care. This Washington provided, and Hamilton was undoubtedly better because of his boss.<br /><br />When George Washington was described “in his 360” as shy, a good actor and too thin-skinned, he might well have agreed. Hopefully—as I was twenty years ago—our first president would have been blessed with a very perceptive human resources director who might pull him aside and sum it up simply: “George, be yourself—just not too much yourself.”<br /><br />Joseph Lucashttps://plus.google.com/105354394351388874296noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7872819010848426693.post-68972943197890668182013-12-09T18:35:00.003-05:002013-12-09T18:36:55.290-05:00Why Were Tariffs Politically Important in Late 19th-Century America?<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:OfficeDocumentSettings> <o:AllowPNG/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings></xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves>false</w:TrackMoves> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing> <w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing> <w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery> <w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:DontAutofitConstrainedTables/> <w:DontVertAlignInTxbx/> <w:UseFELayout/> </w:Compatibility> </w:WordDocument></xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" LatentStyleCount="276"> </w:LatentStyles></xml><![endif]--> <!--[if gte mso 10]><style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} </style><![endif]--> <!--StartFragment--> <div class="MsoNormal">Heather Cox Richardson</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">After the Civil War, new industries brought Americans not just new products, but also more spending money and leisure time than any generation had ever had before. Far flung railroad, oil, and steel </div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-lgUUv4SuexQ/UqZS0Y2FEtI/AAAAAAAAAJU/GLOrcJG2ms4/s1600/Grover_Cleveland_and_Wilson-Gorman_Tariff_Cartoon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-lgUUv4SuexQ/UqZS0Y2FEtI/AAAAAAAAAJU/GLOrcJG2ms4/s640/Grover_Cleveland_and_Wilson-Gorman_Tariff_Cartoon.jpg" width="443" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">President Grover Cleveland humiliated by the Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act.</td></tr></tbody></table>operations, along with those of every other business, needed middle managers who could oversee production and sales and then report back to business owners. These new “white collar” workers had steady incomes and free time. They bought nice clothing and novels, and went to the theater; their wives played lawn tennis and their children had ice cream to eat and toys to play with at newfangled parties given just for them on their birthday.<br /><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Big business brought comfort and entertainment to many Americans, but it also brought grinding poverty to many others. Workers sweating near factory furnaces and entrepreneurs forced out of markets by monopolists resented the power of industrialists. By 1880 they focused their anger on the fact that American industry held its extraordinary position because it was protected by a law that kept foreign goods out of America. That law was called a tariff. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Tariffs were essentially taxes on products coming into America. They meant that foreign goods could not compete with American products because, no matter how cheaply they could be produced, the addition of tariff fees to their selling costs would make them more expensive than American goods. Since American producers did not have to worry about foreign competition, the leaders in an industry could work together and set whatever prices they wished. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><a name='more'></a>People squeezed in the new economy resented the fact that tariffs kept prices artificially high. It didn’t seem fair that laws should prop up business while workers barely scraped by on pennies and industrialists like J. D. Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt lived in mansions in New York City and built 70-room “cottages” in Newport, Rhode Island.<br /><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">No one really knew what to do about the huge fortunes and great poverty of the post-Civil War years. When the Founding Fathers drafted the Constitution, no one could envision those sorts of extremes of wealth. Many late 19th-century Americans urged government to stop industrialists from joining together to set the high prices that made them so rich. Others pointed out that the Constitution had given government no power to break combinations of businessmen.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The Constitution did, though, give Congress the power to regulate the tariff. So, beginning in the 1880s, when the problems of industrialization began to become apparent, Americans who didn’t like the rise of big business clamored for Congress to lower the tariffs that kept foreign products out of the country. Foreign competition, they thought, would break the monopolies that American businessmen used to control the economy. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">For the rest of the century, the tariff was the central issue in American politics. Debates over the tariff were really fights over whether the government should protect business or workers when it developed economic policy. Republican congressmen backed a high tariff because they insisted that protecting business would guarantee a healthy economy in which workers could find jobs. Democratic congressmen wanted to lower the tariff, because they insisted that the economy would collapse if people couldn’t afford to buy very much.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Republicans had invented the nation’s system of extensive tariffs in 1861 to develop new businesses and to raise money to pay for the Civil War. After the war, the tariff became their signature issue. Republicans controlled every branch of the national government from 1861 to 1875, but in that year, Democrats took control of the House of Representatives. Republicans got nervous. For the rest of the century, they focused all their energy on staying in power so they could keep the tariff high. They insisted that, if elected, Democrats would destroy the economy by lowering tariffs.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Republicans managed to protect their system of tariffs until 1913, when Democratic President Woodrow Wilson and a Democratic Congress finally lowered the tariffs and replaced the lost revenue with taxes. The fight over the government’s role in the economy switched for a struggle on tariffs to a fight over taxes, and few Americans even remember now why tariffs were so important to the late 19th century. But to people who lived after the Civil War, tariffs symbolized a much larger struggle between rich and poor, employers and workers, capital and labor. Tariffs were at the very heart of the questions raised by the new era of industry.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">A version of this post will appear <span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">in COBBLESTONE’S upcoming Captains of Industry issue, which examines the role of industry and industrialists in American<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7872819010848426693" name="_GoBack"></a> history.</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><!--EndFragment-->Joseph Lucashttps://plus.google.com/105354394351388874296noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7872819010848426693.post-84251010476578466942013-12-06T11:29:00.001-05:002013-12-06T11:36:43.486-05:00Noblewomen in the Wars of the Roses: Turning Fortune’s Wheel[<i>This&nbsp;originally appeared on <a href="http://laurenjohnson1.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Lauren Johnson's blog</a> on <a href="http://laurenjohnson1.wordpress.com/2013/10/21/noblewomen-in-the-wars-of-the-roses-turning-fortunes-wheel/" target="_blank">October 21, 2013</a></i>]<br /><br />Lauren Johnson<br /><br />Much has been written about the violence of the Wars of the Roses. Civil conflicts inevitably leave a deeper scar than international ones, and this 15th-century combat has lived on in collective memory. <br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-hioCTr2CPNQ/UqH6o1YhYuI/AAAAAAAAAJE/gkDBVnLFxeg/s1600/anne_of_york_and_sir_thomas_st-_leger.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-hioCTr2CPNQ/UqH6o1YhYuI/AAAAAAAAAJE/gkDBVnLFxeg/s400/anne_of_york_and_sir_thomas_st-_leger.jpg" width="322" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Anne of York and her second husband, Thomas St. Leger.</td></tr></tbody></table>However, until recently, one group whose fortunes were &nbsp;closely affected by the Wars has been overlooked: the noblewomen involved. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of medieval history will know why this is. Chroniclers write about the public deeds of noblemen, surviving records document the actions and decisions of that group because they were the ones who attended Parliament and fought in battles. Finding information about women – even the richest, most influential women – is hard work. And it is only with the increasing interest in social and gender history in the late 20th century that the difficult sleuthing necessary to unravel the lives of women was undertaken in earnest.<br /><br />However, for every man directly involved in the Wars of the Roses there were numerous female relatives who were not only themselves affected by the conflict, but played an active part in it. Before you think I’ve gone too far, I’m not suggesting there were vast swathes of pseudo-Amazons marauding around 15th-century England. Women did not fight in the Wars, as far as anyone has discovered. Even Margaret of Anjou, who was the leader of the Lancastrian resistance from 1461-1471, never raised a lance. But perhaps our obsession with the bloodiness of this conflict, with the horror of violence on English soil, has blinded us to the essential work of women in this period. That is understandable. After all, attainder law and enfeoffment are definitely not as "sexy" topics as beheadings and battles. How can the ancient countess of Oxford, struggling to resist attempts to steal her estate by writing letters and employing lawyers, compare with the exploits of her son – leaping from castles to escape imprisonment and laying siege to St. Michael’s Mount? But the activities of noblewomen in this conflict were not considered inconsequential at the time. On the contrary, efforts to claw lands back to one’s family by battling through the law courts or pleading with prominent powerholders were deemed essential to those involved, and at a time when many men found themselves on the wrong side of the law or battlefield, and thus lost their authority (or their life), it fell to their wives and mothers to try to save their estates.<br /><br /><a name='more'></a>Again, at first this hardly seems an &nbsp;honorable effort. We find the land- and money-grabbing tendencies of our 15th-century forebears rather grubby. But in a time when land determined status, ensured inheritance, and truly reflected power, if you wanted to maintain your influence in the world, it was the absolute essential of noble existence. And to lose one’s estate represented the possibility of extreme impoverishment, not only for you but for all future generations of your family. After land, came your dynasty. The two were interlinked, and both determined your own status and honor before others.<br /><br />Thus, when Lady Margaret Hungerford spent twenty years struggling to regain the estates lost by her male relatives – firstly by a heavy ransom during the Hundred Years War and then by backing the wrong horse in the Wars of the Roses – no one thought it was time ill spent. The Hungerford men remained loyal Lancastrians, and were attainted (had their estates, titles, and inheritances confiscated by the crown) as a result. With her son and grandsons rendered powerless, Margaret was the only one who could act to save their lands for future generations. She was wise enough to know that courting the new regime, the Yorkist dynasty, might be the only long-term solution to the family’s troubles. She shackled the interests of powerful men to her own family’s by enfeoffing her estates to leading Yorkists like the earls of Warwick and Essex, and by arranging her granddaughter’s marriage to the son of the king’s best friend, Lord Hastings. She also knew how to cheat the system, suppressing the intelligence that certain estates she was holding really belonged to her attainted son. When the duke of Gloucester – future Richard III, and remarkably adept at sniffing out the inheritances of rich elderly women – discovered the truth, Margaret did not simply give up, but repeatedly issued petitions to have the estates restored. When installments of mortgages were due, she made new loans, sold lands and even plate. When Margaret made her will in 1476, she, like her husband before her, complained of having little to leave to her dependents. As a last sign of her political acuity, she stipulated that her grandson could only inherit her lands if he swore loyalty to the reigning Yorkist king for a decade. Even on her deathbed she was determined to save the Hungerford estate.<br /><br />We know of other women who pursued their family’s interests in defiance of the letter of the law. Anne, duchess of Exeter is a unique case. As the Yorkist King Edward’s sister she was far from supportive of her husband’s loyalty to the Lancastrian cause. Usually, the interests of a woman’s birth family would be abandoned on marriage in favor of her husband’s, but in this case Anne remained firmly on the side of her brother. Her husband was attained in the first Yorkist parliament and fled abroad, but Anne stayed behind – and was immediately granted the confiscated estate of her husband. Later, she divorced him and remarried. According to attainder and divorce law, she should thus have forfeited her dower lands – instead, she not only kept them but also gained control of the entirety of her husband’s estate.<br /><br />Margaret Beauchamp (mother of Margaret Beaufort and thus grandmother of the future Henry VII) was certainly no shrinking violet in the law courts. When her second husband, Leo, lord Welles, was attainted and killed she managed to maintain control over dower lands that should legally have been stripped from her. She even went further, and effectively disinherited her stepson Richard by alienating parts of the Welles estate to herself and her son, John.<br /><br />To modern eyes this brutal stripping away of lands and money from your husband or stepson seems ruthlessly avaricious. But we need to bear in mind what might happen to these women if they did <i>not </i>fight their corner. There are numerous petitions that survive from women left destitute by the loss of their estate.<br /><br />The widowed Eleanor, lady Dacre, complained in 1467 that "she has been despoiled of her goods by the Scots and other rebels and has no means of support." Maud, lady Willoughby, had not only her estates but also her "clothing and goods" seized by the crown. Anne, lady Neville, was left an unsupported widow "to the great hurt and heaviness and uttermost undoing of your Suppliant, considering that she hath not wereof to find her (money for) her children and servants." In 1464, Eleanor, duchess of Somerset (who lost her husband and all her four sons to the Lancastrian cause) appealed to the Yorkist king that she "hath been in jeopardy of her life, robbed and spoiled in such wise as she was like to have perished for lack of sustenance, had not divers persons of their very pity and tenderness relieved and comforted her."<br /><br />According to the chronicler, Fabyan, after her husband’s attainder, Margaret, countess of Oxford, had nothing "to live upon, but as the people of their charities would give to her, or what she might get with her needle." However, we should not see the countess simply as a victim of her husband’s actions. A letter sent by the earl to his wife in the wake of his defeat at the Battle of Barnet in 1471 reveals that she was aiding him in his rebellion: "Also ye shall send me in all haste all the ready money that ye can make; and so many of my men as can come well horsed, and that they come in divers parcels. Also that my horse be sent, with my steel saddles, and bid the yeoman of the horse cover them with leather." The countess was clearly sending men, funds, and – not to be underestimated – moral support to her husband. Compare the earl of Oxford’s persistence and ultimate reward (his estates were restored and augmented after he helped Henry VII to the throne) with the miserable end of the duke of Exeter, abandoned and stripped of his estate by his wife, "begging his pittance from house to house" in Burgundy, too poor even to afford hose according to one chronicler.<br /><br />To demonstrate how we perhaps fail to grasp the sincerity of noblewomen’s desire to maintain their estates in order to protect their children and own persons, we need only consider the recent representation of Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII in fiction. In <i>The White Queen</i> Philippa Gregory presented Margaret as a woman obsessed with her son’s claim to the throne. In reality, Margaret was concerned simply with a) his survival and b) his right to the Richmond estate. Given that during her brief marriage to Henry’s father she had endured losing her virginity at twelve, being widowed a matter of months later, and giving birth at thirteen (probably rendering her infertile due to the stress of the labor), it is little wonder that she would fight to maintain every claim that her son had to her late husband’s inheritance. Something good had to come of her suffering.<br /><br />Margaret Beaufort represents a microcosm of all of the noblewomen mentioned here, and the many more who both suffered and triumphed during the Wars of the Roses. Sometimes they endured great personal hardship and sometimes they received reward beyond their wildest dreams, and certainly beyond what the law should have allowed them. But their success or failure was not made solely by outside forces. These women were weak or powerful in their own right, and despite the vagaries of war it was their skill, cunning, and acumen (or lack thereof) that set the fates not only of themselves, but of the generations that followed them.<br /><br />This information is taken from my Masters thesis, <i>The impact of the Wars of the Roses on Noblewomen, 1450-1509</i>, Oxford, 2007.<br /><br />Joseph Lucashttps://plus.google.com/105354394351388874296noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7872819010848426693.post-43515423539225196792013-12-05T14:12:00.000-05:002013-12-05T14:27:14.748-05:00Life Is a Verb<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6t_QsBqr5WU/UqDOPyuVVwI/AAAAAAAAAI4/IPOQkR15K2o/s1600/Duble_herma_of_Socrates_and_Seneca_Antikensammlung_Berlin_07.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a>Steven Cromack<br /><br />The study of antiquity in American schools is superficial, lackluster, and in a state of asphyxia. State curriculum frameworks have all but stripped the histories of ancient Greece and Rome of depth, meaning, <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6t_QsBqr5WU/UqDOPyuVVwI/AAAAAAAAAI4/IPOQkR15K2o/s1600/Duble_herma_of_Socrates_and_Seneca_Antikensammlung_Berlin_07.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6t_QsBqr5WU/UqDOPyuVVwI/AAAAAAAAAI4/IPOQkR15K2o/s320/Duble_herma_of_Socrates_and_Seneca_Antikensammlung_Berlin_07.jpg" width="258" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ancient bust of Seneca.</td></tr></tbody></table>and relevancy. Ancient Greece was more than the origin of democracy, more than a group of city-states,&nbsp;<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6t_QsBqr5WU/UqDOPyuVVwI/AAAAAAAAAI4/IPOQkR15K2o/s1600/Duble_herma_of_Socrates_and_Seneca_Antikensammlung_Berlin_07.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a>and stood for more than a mythology. Rome was not just an empire, and it offered the world more than the concept of a senate. At the heart of these cultures was the idea that life is a verb, something that humans must<i> do</i>; something they must <i>will</i> into their world.<br /><br />Greek democracy failed miserably. The other city-states quivered under the threat of Athens and her oppressive empire. Furthermore, the Greeks often envisaged humans caught in a double-bind, ensnared in webs of conflicting moral obligations between their relations and the meddling gods. As a result, the Greeks thought themselves to be better off dead than living. “For man the best thing is never to be born, never to look upon the sun’s rays,” bemoaned Theognis of Megara. “That the best thing for a man is not to be born, and if already born, to die as soon as possible,” bewailed Silenus.<br />&nbsp; <br /><a name='more'></a>Rome was about more than a great capital city and gladiators. By the end of the republic, Romans desperately yearned for hope and meaning. The tyrants Caesar and Pompey battled not for honor and virtue, but for total control of the government. The Romans’ society was falling apart right before their eyes. Everything they believed in was slowly disappearing. “The whole scene is changed,” Cicero wailed, “as though for me the sun has fallen out of the sky.” Even more disconcerting was the idea that maybe this chaos was their fault. “[Rome] is crucified by conscience, tormented by shame,” decried Flaccus.<br /><br />And yet, out of the misery and despair came life itself. The Greeks and the Romans offered ways to make life worth living. Through his teacher Socrates, Plato argued that <i>aletheia</i>, or the higher truth, was worth pursuing. When a person finds this deeper truth, she finds fulfillment because in knowing this truth she understands completeness and meaning. In his <i>Nicomachean Ethics</i>, Aristotle declared that the deep joy that comes from knowing thyself and becoming an active citizen in society, i.e., happiness, makes life worth living. Plato’s <i>aletheia</i> and Aristotle’s happiness, however, only come from actions—search, deduce, pursue, and contribute.<br /><br />Romans insisted that humans live by the philosophies of either Stoicism or Epicureanism. The Stoics rejected the senses, put mind over matter, and as a result felt no pain. To an Epicurean, the highest good is pleasure.&nbsp; It is best to enjoy the moment, and put one’s problems aside. Everyone is going to die no matter what and so <i>carpe diem</i>—seize the day; “seize” being a verb.&nbsp; <br /><br />Read the Greeks and the Romans. Pursue life and truth. At some point in our lives, we are all captives of despair. But, as the Roman poet Seneca reminds us in his <i>Troades</i>, “Let us live. For captives this suffices.”<br /><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6t_QsBqr5WU/UqDOPyuVVwI/AAAAAAAAAI4/IPOQkR15K2o/s1600/Duble_herma_of_Socrates_and_Seneca_Antikensammlung_Berlin_07.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br /></a></div>Joseph Lucashttps://plus.google.com/105354394351388874296noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7872819010848426693.post-69590248574696240902013-12-03T11:09:00.000-05:002013-12-03T11:10:03.214-05:00The Passing of Michael KammenRandall Stephens<br /><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/--yXkFKB6wYo/Up33VvgBq6I/AAAAAAAAF5I/fSFOja6IMKM/s1600/kammen2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/--yXkFKB6wYo/Up33VvgBq6I/AAAAAAAAF5I/fSFOja6IMKM/s320/kammen2.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Michael Kammen</td></tr></tbody></table>It is with heavy hearts that historians, former students, and others are <a href="http://www.oah.org/programs/news/oah-mourns-the-passing-of-michael-g-kammen/">reporting</a> on the death of the <span class="st"><a href="http://www.pulitzer.org/awards/1973">Pulitzer Prize</a>-winning </span>historian Michael Kammen.&nbsp; He leaves an enormous legacy as an inspiring teacher, mentor, and scholar.<br /><br />H. Roger Segelken of the<i> </i><a href="http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2013/12/american-historian-michael-g-kammen-dies-77"><i>Cornell Chronicle</i></a> writes that Kammen focused "his scholarship at first on the colonial period of American history."&nbsp; He then "broadened his scope to include legal, cultural and social issues of American history in the 19th and 20th centuries." Kammen's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Mystic-Chords-Memory-Transformation-Tradition/dp/0679741771/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1386083920&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=Mystic+Chords+of+Memory%3A+The+Transformation+of+Tradition+in+American+Culture"><i>Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture</i></a> (1991), says Segelken, "helped to create the field of memory studies."&nbsp; (See a short biography of <a href="http://germany.usembassy.gov/kammen.html">Kammen here</a>.)<br /><br />Indeed, Kammen won high praise as a writer. In a <i>New York Times</i> review of <i>Mystic Chords of Memory</i> Thomas Fleming conceded that "not everyone will agree with all his conclusions, but they are presented with superlative style laced with refreshing wit and a refusal to tolerate the occasional fools and scoundrels who populate this patriot's game." (Thomas Fleming, "The Past Is What Catches Up With Us," <i>New York Times</i>, January 12, 1992, BR11.)<br /><br /><a name='more'></a>To mark Kammen's passing, I post here a 2010 essay that he wrote for a <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&amp;type=summary&amp;url=/journals/historically_speaking/v011/11.1.kammen.html"><i>Historically Speaking</i> roundtable on teaching the art of writing</a>. Here Kammen considers the examples set by historians Samuel Eliot Morison, Carl Becker, Barbara Tuchman, C. Vann Woodward, and others. <br /><br /><b>Michael Kammen, "Historians on Writing," <i>Historically Speaking</i> (January 2010)</b><br /><br />Historians distinguish themselves in diverse ways, yet relatively few are remembered as gifted prose stylists, and fewer still have left us non-didactic missives with tips about the finer points of writing well. Following his retirement from Cornell in 1941, Carl Becker accepted a spring term appointment as Neilson Research Professor at Smith College. Early in 1942 he delivered a charming address in Northampton titled “The Art of Writing.” Although admired as one of the most enjoyable writers among historians in the United States, Becker’s witty homily for the young women that day concerned good writing in general, and his exemplars ranged widely. He cited Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, for example, because “the author’s intention was to achieve a humorous obscurity by writing nonsense. He had a genius for that sort of thing, so that, as one may say, he achieved obscurity with a clarity rarely if ever equaled before or since.”1<br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-WvfR04DqtxY/Up4BY3yKFbI/AAAAAAAAF5Y/l8BO1eGkTDk/s1600/historianbecker.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-WvfR04DqtxY/Up4BY3yKFbI/AAAAAAAAF5Y/l8BO1eGkTDk/s320/historianbecker.jpg" width="274" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Carl Becker</td></tr></tbody></table><br />Other notable historians have shared Becker’s belief that writing about the past is a form of art—or ideally, at least, ought to be. Theodore Roosevelt’s presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1912 capped the generations that so admired Francis Parkman and Henry Adams by designating his subject “History as Literature.” All too soon, however, TR’s highly idealized perspective seemed unattainable by the new professionals in academe. Even Becker swiftly became pessimistic about the prospects for historical “literature,” especially as he observed his guild developing in its formative years. He wrote candidly to a friend in 1915:<br /><div style="margin-left: 1em;"><br />It would be possible to get perhaps 20 men who could write good history in a straightforward and readable manner; but if they should be expected to raise their work to the level of real literature—to the level of [J. R.] Green or Parkman, for example—I fear it can’t be done. Men of high literary talent unfortunately do not go in for the serious study of history very often; and the study of history, as conducted in our universities, is unfortunately not designed to develop such talent as exists. Besides, history is I should say one of the most difficult subjects in the world to make literature out of; I mean history in the general sense, as distinct from biography or the narrative of some particular episode. </div><br />Nevertheless, he went on to add: “Yet it is possible, and in my opinion highly desirable to come as near doing just that thing as possible. With all our busy activity history has less influence on the thought of our time than it had in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, and one principal reason is that it isn’t read.”2<br /><br />A generation later Samuel Eliot Morison, who took Parkman as his model, lamented that American historians “have forgotten that there is an art of writing history,” and titled his homily “History as a Literary Art.” Subsequently Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., George Kennan, and C. Vann Woodward also provided instructive essays explaining how and why historical writing might flow in a creative manner that can engage the general reader.3<br /><br />In the mid-1980s, when the Library of America produced stout volumes of works by Parkman and Adams, Woodward seized upon those occasions as opportunities to explain why these authors once enjoyed popular appeal and remained eminently worthy of visitation: narrative power, irony, subtlety, and [End Page 17] ambiguity in Parkman, wit, irony, humor, and a love of paradox in the case of Adams, whom Woodward called a “master of English prose.”4<br /><br />J.H. Hexter devoted at least half a dozen droll essays to the challenges of Doing History, and the particular problems faced by academic historians. After describing just how arduous historical research can be, he turned with characteristic whimsy to the equally demanding challenge of first-rate prose.<br /><br /><div style="margin-left: 1em;">[Once] the research ends, the working up of the evidence into a finished piece of history writing starts, and the historian at last tastes the pleasure of scholarly creation. Or does he? Well, if he has an aptitude at the management of evidence and a flare for vigorous prose, perhaps he does enjoy himself a good bit. But what if he has not? Then through sheet after sheet of manuscript, past twisted sentences, past contorted paragraphs, past one pitiful wreck of a chapter after another he drags the leaden weight of his club-footed prose. Let us draw a curtain to blot out this harrowing scene and turn to look at one of the fortunate few to whom the writing of a historical study is a pleasure of sorts. He writes the last word of his manuscript with a gay flourish—and he better had, because it is the last gay flourish he is going to be able to indulge in for quite a while. He has arrived at the grey morning-after of historical scholarship, the time of the katzenjammer with the old cigar butts and stale whisky of his recent intellectual binge still to be tidied up. He must reread the manuscript and then read the typescript and correct and revise as he reads.5 </div><br />In a different essay honoring Garrett Mattingly, the historian most admired by Hexter, he addressed what he considered the false dichotomy between narrative and analytical history. Many in the academy regard the former as inferior because it only tells what but not how and why. Citing Renaissance Diplomacy (1955) by Mattingly as a prime example of ways to marry the two, Hexter declared that,<br /><br /><div style="margin-left: 1em;">in the best writing of history, analysis and narrative do not stand over against each other in opposition and contradiction; nor do they merely supplement each other mechanically. They are organically integrated with each other; to separate them is not an act of classification but of amputation. It is an act the frequent performance of which stands a good chance of killing history altogether.6 <br /><br /></div>Carl Becker concurred eloquently in his famous essay about Frederick Jackson Turner. He noted the need to interweave individuals and the interplay of social forces that are time-specific with “general notions” and conceptualizations that can provide explanatory power:<br /><div style="margin-left: 1em;"><br />Well, the generalization spreads out in space, but how to get the wretched thing to move forward in time! The generalization, being timeless, will not move forward; and so the harassed historian, compelled to get on with the story, must return in some fashion to the individual, the concrete event, the “thin red line of heroes.” Employing these two methods, the humane historian will do his best to prevent them from beating each other to death within the covers of his book. But the strain is great.7 </div><br />In Becker’s correspondence he often reflected upon the challenges of writing history well, especially in letters to Turner, his esteemed mentor, to Wallace Notestein, his sometime colleague at Cornell, and to Leo Gershoy, perhaps his favorite Ph.D. student. In one letter he even listed historians whose prose he especially admired.8 (My own favorites include Bernard DeVoto, Wallace Stegner, Barbara Tuchman, and Taylor Branch among nonacademics, and then Woodward, Hexter, Richard Hofstadter, and David Potter from the guild.)<br /><br />Becker has a special place in my heart, and not just because he taught at Cornell. His clarity, pace, and subtle wit are especially appealing, but above all, perhaps, it is his gift for finding aphorisms that memorably epitomize the essence of a book. Best remembered, perhaps, is the end of the first chapter of his published dissertation on political parties in revolutionary New York, namely, that two questions determined party history from 1765 until 1776: “The first was the question of home rule; the second was the question, if we may so put it, of who should rule at home.” He achieved that effect again, even more pithily, in his most famous book, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers. Referring to the scientific orientation of the philosophes, Becker quipped that “having denatured God, they deified nature.”9<br /><br />In the same book, published in 1932, Becker anticipated Raymond Williams’s and Daniel T. Rodgers’s influential works devoted to the importance of keywords in culture, society, and politics (1976 and 1987 respectively). Here is Becker’s essential passage from a fascinating study that acknowledges diachronic change even while insisting upon overlooked patterns of persistence and continuity.<br /><div style="margin-left: 1em;"><br />In the thirteenth century the key words would no doubt be God, sin, grace, salvation, heaven, and the like; in the nineteenth century, matter, fact, matter-of-fact, evolution, progress; in the twentieth century, relativity, process, adjustment, function, complex. In the eighteenth century the words without which no enlightened person could reach a restful conclusion were nature, natural law, first cause, reason, sentiment, humanity, perfectibility (these last three being necessary only for the more tender-minded, perhaps).10 <br /><br /></div>Like Woodward, Becker had a particular fondness for irony in historical writing. Close friends in the profession who misunderstood what he was up to in his memorable 1931 presidential address to the American Historical Association, “Everyman His Own Historian,” chastened him for “advocating the futility of historical research under a thin guise of irony.” Nonplussed and bemused, Becker defended himself by observing that “a writer has to be something of an exhibitionist if he expects to develop a method of expression which people can recognize as definitely &amp; individually his.” Today we customarily refer to that as finding one’s own voice, as <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&amp;type=summary&amp;url=/journals/historically_speaking/v011/11.1.pyne.html">Stephen Pyne has mentioned</a>.11<br /><br />Four months before he died, Becker (an unpedantic pedagogue) provided a former Ph.D. student with a close reading of her new book manuscript. He urged particular attention to the transitions between chapters. “The great thing is,” he wrote, “never leave a reader wondering where he has been and is at the end of a chapter, or where he is or where he is going at the beginning of the next one. But of course in order to do this you must be yourself very sure where you are at all times, and why you are there and how you got there.” Although Becker is principally remembered as a brilliant writer, he was also a skilled and conscientious graduate teacher, and remained so long after his fledglings had left their nest in Ithaca.12 <br /><br />_______________________<br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;">1.&nbsp; First published in Phil L. Snyder, ed., <i>Detachment and the Writing of History: Essays and Letters of Carl L. Becker </i>(Cornell University Press, 1958), 125–26.<br /><br />2.&nbsp; Carl Becker to William B. Munro, July 23, 1915, in Michael Kammen, ed., <i>What Is the Good of History? Selected Letters of Carl L. Becker, 1900–1945</i> (Cornell University Press, 1973), 33–34.<br /><br />3.&nbsp; Samuel Eliot Morison, “History as a Literary Art” (1946), reprinted in Morison, <i>By Land and by Sea</i> (Knopf, 1953), 289–298, the quotation at 289; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “The Historian as Artist,” <i>Atlantic Monthly</i> 212 (July 1963): 35–40; George Kennan, “The Experience of Writing History,” <i>Virginia Quarterly Review</i> 36 (1960): 205–214; and C. Vann Woodward, <i>The Future of the Past </i>(Oxford University Press, 1989), 337–358.<br /><br />4.&nbsp; Woodward, <i>Future of the Past</i>, 340–48.<br /><br />5.&nbsp; J.H. Hexter, “The Historian and His Society,” in Hexter, <i>Doing History</i> (Indiana University Press, 1971), 93.<br /><br />6.&nbsp; J.H. Hexter, “Garrett Mattingly, Historian,” in ibid., 170.<br /><br />7.&nbsp; Carl Becker, “Frederick Jackson Turner” (1927), reprinted in Becker, <i>Everyman His Own Historian</i> (F. S. Crofts, 1935), 229.<br /><br />8.&nbsp; Kammen, ed., <i>What Is the Good of History?</i> 34.<br /><br />9.&nbsp; Carl Becker, <i>The History of Political Parties in the Province of New York, 1760–1776</i> (University of Wisconsin Press, 1960), 22; Becker, <i>The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers </i>(Yale University Press, 1932), 63.<br /><br />10.&nbsp; Becker, <i>Heavenly City</i>, 47.<br /><br />11.&nbsp; Carl Becker to William E. Dodd, Jan. 27, 1932, and Becker to Gershoy [spring 1932?], in Kammen, ed., <i>What Is the Good of History? </i>156, 162.<br /><br />12.&nbsp; Carl Becker to Mildred J. Headings, Dec. 14, 1944, in ibid., 328–29 (italicized words underlined in the original); and see Burleigh Taylor Wilkins, <i>Carl Becker: A Biographical Study in American Intellectual History</i> (M.I.T. Press, 1961).<br /><br />13.&nbsp; For a convenient compilation of what many historians have written over the years, see A.S. Eisenstadt, ed., <i>The Craft of American History: Selected Essays, 2 vols.</i> (Harper &amp; Row, 1966). </span>Randallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16755286304057000048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7872819010848426693.post-48356157725078305642013-12-02T14:19:00.000-05:002013-12-02T19:30:20.561-05:00Listen More; Judge Less: Lessons from Jim GrossmanElizabeth Lewis Pardoe <br /><br />Thanks to a series of <a href="http://www.teaglefoundation.org/Grantmaking/Grantees/default/?gg=404&amp;rfp=391&amp;o=0" target="_blank">Teagle Teaching Workshops</a> at Northwestern, <a href="http://www.historians.org/about-aha-and-membership/aha-staff" target="_blank">the executive director of the American Historical Association, Jim Grossman</a>, gave a lecture on “Historical Thinking and Public Culture.” Much of what he said hearkened to conversations I had at <a href="http://www.bu.edu/historic/conf2012/conf_2012.html" target="_blank">the Historical Society’s 2012 conference "Popularizing Historical Knowledge: Practice, Prospects, and Perils."</a> As Jim said, we know people like history. <a href="http://www.history.com/" target="_blank">The </a><a href="http://www.history.com/" target="_blank">History Channel</a>, thousands of reenactors, and millions of genealogists indicate a thirst for knowledge of the past. Derision of such historical fancy keeps doctoral candidates clothed in a veil of superiority while their bank balances dwindle. Grossman suggested a revolutionary shift in academic historical thought: dispense with the patronizing judgment and listen to what people want to learn.<br /><br />The lesson holds for the undergraduate classroom. Faculty ask one another, “what are you teaching?” Grossman suggests we end the obsession with our own performances at the front of class and focus upon what the students at the back learned. While teaching and learning have a symbiotic relationship, the shift of emphasis from professor to listener signals a broader embrace of history’s public value. The nuances of Foucauldian analysis may help the professor frame his or her argument, but if every iPhone in the lecture hall sends out a frantic&nbsp; “wtf?” we have lost the pedagogical point.<br /><br /><a name='more'></a>Few undergraduates seek to join the professoriate. All but a few desire paid employment. Grossman would not suggest that we shut our doors and send our students across campus to become computer programmers. However, we owe our history majors the language with which to market themselves upon graduation. Messiah College’s John Fea makes a noble effort in his blog series, <a href="http://www.philipvickersfithian.com/search/label/So%20What%20Can%20You%20Do%20With%20a%20History%20Major" target="_blank">“So What CAN You Do With a History Major?”</a> Until every historian commits to explain the value of historical thinking, parents and politicians will direct students away from the classes possessed of the power to make them empathic progeny and conscientious citizens.<br /><br />So then, what does Jim Grossman think history has to offer John and Jane Q. Public? The contingency and complexity of the human experience. Every medical professional takes a patient history, but how many understand the art of the open-ended question or the capacity for a written document to contain multiple truths? Academic historians sneer at biographers, but nothing sells better than a book with a president (or his wife) on the cover. The myths that undermine popular conceptions of the past emerge from these tomes. What if history classes taught students to compose biographies based upon a messy past in which the subject is but one actor with limited agency and tackled the linear hagiographies lining airport shelves within ivy-covered halls?<br /><br />History doctoral programs posit law schools as their perpetual rivals. Grossman confronted a paneled room filled with professors and would-be-professors with a painful truth. Historians slander law schools as “vocational,” but law graduates take their skills and apply them in myriad occupations outside the law. Doctoral programs in history train their students to become one thing, professors. Who looks vocational now?&nbsp; <br /><br />Historians also like to slander lawyers as unethical, but Grossman argues that Ph.D. programs have become intellectual ponzi schemes. Universities constantly expand the number of graduate student TAs who “sell” history to undergraduates although they will never reap the rewards of tenure, because the removal of a retirement age depleted the lines available. Ethics demand early, repeated, reality checks. Tell graduate students that tenured jobs at R1 universities are as rare as positions in the NBA. We know that every child with a great playground jump shot cannot become Michael Jordan; neither can every brilliant young scholar become <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalie_Zemon_Davis" target="_blank">Natalie Zemon Davis</a>.&nbsp; <br /><br />Furthermore, that brilliant young scholar might prefer to avoid the life of multiple moves and long-distance relationships nigh-on inherent to a lofty academic career. Grossman shared a study that concluded that historians outside the academy are happier than those within it. Commitment to a life of the mind ought not be mutually exclusive with commitment to a physical community. Early introduction to the options that may resolve the tensions between such commitments would remove the secrecy and shame associated with the pursuit of positions off the tenure track. Because I work outside a given department, my office often serves as the “safe space” in which to discuss the desire to stay with another person or in a particular geographic region rather than to travel wherever a tenure line might take an end-stage dissertator. The anxiety associated with such decisions undermines students’ job searches in all arenas.&nbsp; <br /><br />I suspect if we could borrow <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance" target="_blank">Rawls’s veil of ignorance</a> and place it over the tenured and chaired advisers who direct dissertations, they would offer greater empathy toward their advisees’ plight. Those who won the academic lottery sometimes forget that their success came from luck in addition to ability. Grossman reminded skeptics from his audience of a friend who got an offer from an illustrious Ivy on the same day he received a rejection from a regional university. Now, what if that friend had no desire to live in New Haven, because a spouse, ailing parents, or children loved their environs elsewhere?&nbsp; <br /><br />Proper pedagogy prepares people to make difficult personal and professional decisions. Historical thinking helps in that task. To my mind, we cannot take Grossman's advice and move our ideas <i>and </i>ourselves beyond the cloister known as tenure too soon.<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-7EIGaf-1koQ/UpzcOffVOCI/AAAAAAAAAIo/PZWLJRF2at0/s1600/GHI_189.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br /></a></div><br />Joseph Lucashttps://plus.google.com/105354394351388874296noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7872819010848426693.post-41449513190776459452013-11-29T10:05:00.000-05:002013-11-29T10:05:00.438-05:00Christmas Creep and Other Joyous Holiday Traditions[<i>We repost this piece by Eric Schultz, which originally appeared on November 19, 2013.</i>]<br />Eric B. Schultz <br /><br />Not long ago, a friend sent me a video which featured a new holiday character, “Pumpkin-Headed Turkey Claus,” with a note saying how appalled he was with the way retailers had hijacked <br /><div style="float: right; font-style: italic; margin: 0pt 10px 5px 0pt;"><object data="http://www.youtube.com/v/56jfw2ekToA?version=3&amp;hl=en_US" height="265" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="320"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><param name="src" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/56jfw2ekToA?version=3&amp;hl=en_US"><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true"></object></div>the holidays.<br /><br />I’m pretty jaded myself by holiday retailers. But even I’ve winced a few times this fall.&nbsp; There was the Christmas wrapping-paper sale I stumbled upon in mid-October, for example, and the recent news that many large retailers would be opening their doors at 8 or 9 p.m. on Thanksgiving evening.&nbsp; (Who’s going to eat cold turkey sandwiches with me?)&nbsp; Now, I’d been introduced to the Pumpkin-Headed Turkey Claus offering proof positive that Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas had finally been smashed together into the twisted wreckage of one long retail extravaganza.<br /><br />Remember the time when Christmas was simple and less commercial, when you could step out of your door into a Currier and Ives print.&nbsp; No?&nbsp; How about a $29 Thomas Kinkade “Memories of Christmas” print?&nbsp; Precisely.&nbsp; One of the greatest of all holiday traditions is recalling a holiday season<i>—</i>historian Stephen Nissenbaum reminds us in his superb book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Battle-Christmas-Stephen-Nissenbaum/dp/0679740384"><i>The Battle For Christmas</i></a>—that never existed at all.<br /><br /><a name='more'></a>Commercial Christmas presents were already common in America by the 1820s, Nissenbaum writes, and in 1834 a letter to a Boston Unitarian magazine complained about aggressive advertising and the fact that “everybody gives away something to somebody,” turning the holiday into a source of bewilderment.&nbsp; In 1850 when Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote her Christmas story, readers could identify with the character who groaned, “Christmas is coming in a fortnight, and I have got to think up presents for everybody!&nbsp; Dear me, it’s so tedious!”<a href="http://books.google.no/books?id=BmxL4gRhg9sC&amp;pg=PA212&amp;dq=%22%E2%80%9CChristmas+is+coming+in+a+fortnight%22&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=4hOpUPnFK9DR4QSqpIH4AQ&amp;redir_esc=y#v=onepage&amp;q=%22%E2%80%9CChristmas%20is%20coming%20in%20a%20fortnight%22&amp;f=false">*</a>&nbsp; Just a few years before, Philadelphia’s confectioners had begun displaying huge cakes in their shop windows a few days before Christmas, actively competing for customers.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-99zoC3drMKY/UKkaYUQW6GI/AAAAAAAADsM/N8hK88psG-U/s1600/santa_radio.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-99zoC3drMKY/UKkaYUQW6GI/AAAAAAAADsM/N8hK88psG-U/s400/santa_radio.jpg" width="251" /></a></div>Professor Nissenbaum also reminds us that the figure of Santa Claus, all but invented in the early nineteenth century, was first employed to sell Christmas goods in the 1820s.&nbsp; By the 1840s the jolly old chief of elves had become a common commercial icon.&nbsp; Christmas had turned into “the thin end of the wedge by which many Americans became enmeshed in the more self-indulgent aspects of consumer spending.”<br /><br />Few technologies would have a greater impact on Christmas and consumerism than the railroad.&nbsp; In <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Search-Order-1877-1920-Robert-Wiebe/dp/0809001047"><i>The Search for Order</i></a>, Robert Wiebe tells us that it was two great explosions of railroad construction following 1879 and 1885 that, combined, produced hundreds of miles of feeder line designed to connect countless American towns—once isolated communities—into a single, massive, national distribution system.&nbsp; This was aided by agreement on coordinated time zones in 1883, and a standard railroad gauge largely adopted by 1890.&nbsp; <br /><br />Retailers heard the whistle and jumped on board.&nbsp; In <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/chi-chicagodays-firstcatalog-story,0,3067002.story">1872, Aaron Montgomery Ward</a> produced his first mail-order catalogue, in 1874 Macy’s presented its first Christmas display, and in 1888 the first Sears catalog was published.&nbsp; By 1890 many Americans were trading Christmas cards (thanks to affordable imports), and Santa had gone from icon to messenger, his arrival defining the holiday for many children.&nbsp;&nbsp; Mass distribution had become a reality, though Santa might have felt more at home in a boxcar than a sleigh.<br /><br />In November 1924, editor and journalist Samuel Strauss (1870-1953) penned “Things Are in the Saddle” for the <i>Atlantic Monthly</i>, an essay that addressed head-on the issue of American consumerism (or what he termed “consumptionism”, i.e.—the science of compelling men to use more and more things). “Something new has come to confront American democracy,” Strauss sounded the alarm.&nbsp; “The Fathers of the Nation did not foresee it.”&nbsp; And then he asked the reader, “What is the first condition of our civilization?&nbsp; In the final reason, is it not concerned with the production of things?&nbsp; It is not that we must turn out large quantities of things; it is that we must turn out ever larger quantities of things, more this year than last year?” Writing in the month leading up to Christmas, Strauss concluded, “The problem before us today is not how to produce the goods, but how to produce the customers.” <br /><br />What had happened, he concluded with some pain, was that the American citizen had become the American consumer.&nbsp; Civic duty now meant buying goods as fast as the great machines of industry could produce them, and the great trains of industry could deliver.&nbsp; <br /><br />Strauss implicitly understood that the relationship between our year-end holidays and merchant needs has always been incestuous.&nbsp; While the Pumpkin-Headed Turkey Claus didn’t exist in 1939, for example, President Franklin Roosevelt most certainly did.&nbsp; When merchants complained that a late Thanksgiving (on November 30) would reduce the number of shopping days before Christmas, he gladly changed the date.&nbsp;&nbsp; The <a href="http://books.google.no/books?id=tPiyAAAAIAAJ&amp;pg=PA80&amp;dq=Thanksgiving+Proclamation+of+1939&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=bxWpUKwYyI7iBOLtgYgN&amp;redir_esc=y#v=onepage&amp;q=Thanksgiving%20Proclamation%20of%201939&amp;f=false">Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1939</a> declared the date of the holiday to be not the last, but the second-to-last Thursday of the month.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-GAnz8p-9An4/UKkYVrTBq8I/AAAAAAAADsE/FDQGwR86jyQ/s1600/pumpkin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="236" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-GAnz8p-9An4/UKkYVrTBq8I/AAAAAAAADsE/FDQGwR86jyQ/s320/pumpkin.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>That same year, Robert L. May created Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer for Montgomery Ward.&nbsp;&nbsp; And, of course, it’s just a lucky coincidence that 1947’s <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9MyidQh7TQ"><i>Miracle on 34th Street</i></a> wove Santa Claus, Christmas, Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and the company’s flagship store into one happy story.&nbsp; In 1966, another of our beloved holiday classics, <i>It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown</i>, frankensteined Christmas and Halloween when Linus sat in the most sincere of pumpkin patches, waiting for the Great Pumpkin to arise and deliver toys to all the boys and girls.&nbsp; In fact, you might remember that it was in yet another Peanuts special, <i>It's the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown</i>, when the kids are disgusted to find Christmas store displays in the middle of April and a sign warning that there are only 246 days left until Christmas.<br /><br />I don’t mean to sound like the Grinch, but hopefully your children have talked you into purchasing tickets (at $115 per seat) to his live holiday show by now.<br /><br />In any event, Stephen Nissenbaum, Samuel Strauss, and Robert May all remind us that we come by the “Ho-gobble, gobble” of Pumpkin-Headed Turkey Claus honestly, one in a long line of characters that has contributed to what is now called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_creep">“Christmas Creep.”</a>&nbsp; We’ve even developed an entire vocabulary around the launch of retail Christmas, including Grey Thursday, Black Friday and Cyber Monday.&nbsp; It is the very reason you can hear <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fulrewj6Noo">David Bowie and Bing Crosby singing</a> "The Little Drummer Boy" long before the jack-o-lantern on your front porch goes soft and mealy.<br /><br />Columnist Yvonne Abraham wrote recently in the <a href="http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2012/11/15/the-nightmare-long-before-christmas/iARZFiQsHShwBX5GlolSXP/story.html?camp=newsletter"><i>Boston Globe</i></a> that she was shocked to find a house adorned in Christmas lights on the first week of November, and “the red snowman cups at Starbucks came out on Nov. 1. Ditto the elves on shelves at CVS. The wall-to-wall carols weren’t far behind.”&nbsp; Indeed, global warming scientists warn us that our lawns are moving the equivalent of 6 feet south every year due to climate change.&nbsp; It seems the Pumpkin-Headed Turkey Claus is here to warn us that Christmas is moving right before our eyes as well, a few hours earlier every year—a cultural movement that is nearly 200 years old and just as traditional as Old St. Nick himself.&nbsp; Randallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16755286304057000048noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7872819010848426693.post-55718399160208751482013-11-28T09:00:00.000-05:002013-11-28T09:22:56.182-05:00The History of National Thanksgiving[<i>Here we repost a piece on the history of Thanksgiving that originally appeared on Thursday November 25, 2010] &nbsp;</i><br />Heather Cox Richardson<br /><br />Anyone who cares about the history of Thanksgiving generally knows that the Pilgrims and the Wampanoags shared a feast in fall 1621, and that early American leaders periodically declared days of thanksgiving when settlers were supposed to give their thanks for continued life and—with luck—prosperity.<br /><br /><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">The story of how Thanksgiving became a national <a href="http://www.abrahamlincolncartoons.info/Images/Cartoons/800/HW/1863/120563/0776a7b.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://www.abrahamlincolncartoons.info/Images/Cartoons/800/HW/1863/120563/0776a7b.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 478px; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; width: 336px;" /></a>holiday is fuzzier. I’ve always heard that Lincoln proclaimed a national holiday in 1863, but just how and why was never clear.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">The answer is that Lincoln appears essentially to have been pushed into declaring a national holiday in 1863. With that pressure behind him, he recognized that he could use a holiday for an important political statement. Consummate politician that he was, he did so. But he did not stop there. Lincoln pivoted his political statement to express a larger vision of what America should stand for.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">Here is how it happened:</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">An astonishing seventeen state governors declared state thanksgiving holidays in November and December of 1862. The war was going badly for the Union, but the armies still held. Leaders recognized the need to acknowledge the suffering, and yet to keep Americans loyal to the cause. New York governor Edwin Morgan’s widely reprinted proclamation about the holiday reflected that the previous year “is numbered among the dark periods of history, and its sorrowful records are graven on many hearthstones.” But this was nonetheless a time for giving thanks, because “the precious blood shed in the cause of our country will hallow and strengthen our love and our reverence for it and its institutions. . . . Our Government and institutions placed in jeopardy have brought us to a more just appreciation of their value.” (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1862/10/02/news/thanksgiving-in-new-york-proclamation.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">NYT</span>, 11/27/1862, p. 8</a>)</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><a name='more'></a>The following year, ahead of the many expected state proclamations, President Lincoln declared a national day of Thanksgiving. He issued his proclamation on July 15, and the relief in the document was almost palpable. After two years of disasters, the Union army was finally winning. Bloody, yes; battered, yes; but winning. At Gettysburg in early July, Union troops had sent Confederates reeling back southward. Then, on July 4, Vicksburg had finally fallen to U. S. Grant’s army. The military tide was turning.<br /><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">President Lincoln wanted Union supporters to give thanks for the recent successes. He was also aware of faltering enthusiasm for the devastating war and the wavering loyalty of Democrats who were eager to make peace with the Confederates. A national day of thanksgiving for military success and for the protection of the Union would wed religion, thanksgiving, and the Union war effort. So the President declared a national day of thanksgiving.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">But the nation’s first national Thanksgiving was not in November. The date President Lincoln set was Thursday, August sixth.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">On that day, ministers across the country pointed out that the celebration was most apt, as they listed the signal victories of the U.S. Army and Navy in the past year. It was now clear that it was only a matter of time until the Union won the war, they told their congregations. Their predictions reinforced the war effort, of course, just as Lincoln had almost certainly intended.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">While the roots of the national holiday we celebrate lie in the war years, though, the holiday we celebrate does not center on giving thanks for American military victories.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">In October 1863, President Lincoln declared the second national day of Thanksgiving. It is this one that we celebrate, and its purpose was much broader than that of the first.</div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">In the past year, Lincoln declared, the nation had been blessed:</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div style="font-family: arial; font-style: normal; margin-left: 40px;"><span style="font-size: 100%;">In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to invite and provoke the aggressions of foreign States, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere, except in the theatre of military conflict, while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. The needful diversion of wealth and strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence have not arrested the plow, the shuttle or the ship. The ax has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect a continuance of years with large increase of freedom.<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=oGguAAAAIAAJ&amp;pg=PA172&amp;dq=In+the+midst+of+a+civil+war+of+unequaled+magnitude+and+severity,+which+has+sometimes&amp;hl=en&amp;ei=n2buTLSdGMT7lwfq04T5DA&amp;sa=X&amp;oi=book_result&amp;ct=result&amp;resnum=3&amp;ved=0CDAQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&amp;q=In%20the%20midst%20of%20a%20civil%20war%20of%20unequaled%20magnitude%20and%20severity%2C%20which%20has%20sometimes&amp;f=false">*</a></span></div><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=oGguAAAAIAAJ&amp;pg=PA172&amp;dq=In+the+midst+of+a+civil+war+of+unequaled+magnitude+and+severity,+which+has+sometimes&amp;hl=en&amp;ei=n2buTLSdGMT7lwfq04T5DA&amp;sa=X&amp;oi=book_result&amp;ct=result&amp;resnum=3&amp;ved=0CDAQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&amp;q=In%20the%20midst%20of%20a%20civil%20war%20of%20unequaled%20magnitude%20and%20severity%2C%20which%20has%20sometimes&amp;f=false"></a> <br /><div class="MsoNormal"></div>The President invited Americans “in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea, and those who are sojourning in foreign lands” to observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving. <br /><br /><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">It is this one, the celebration of peace, order, and prosperity, that became the defining national holiday.</div>Randallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16755286304057000048noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7872819010848426693.post-57877854464922311442013-11-27T08:45:00.000-05:002013-11-27T08:45:12.226-05:00Rebunking the Pilgrims?<i>One from the vaults: we repost Randall Stephens's contribution, which originally appeared on November 24, 2009.</i><br />[crossposted at <a href="http://usreligion.blogspot.com/">Religion in American History</a>]<br />Randall Stephens<br /><br />As Americans prepare to stuff their faces with turkey, pie, turkey pie, and all manner of bread-related foods, and clock in millions of hours of TV football viewing, it’s worth considering the Pilgrims, originators of <a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_70Gw2abmBeI/SwtFO_QCtWI/AAAAAAAAAaY/Vi_tIkpexcI/s1600/twain.jpg" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_70Gw2abmBeI/SwtFO_QCtWI/AAAAAAAAAaY/Vi_tIkpexcI/s320/twain.jpg" style="float: right; height: 191px; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; width: 253px;" /></a>America's holiday. (I was just thinking that a Martian would have a very hard time understanding how football and overeating are linked to an otherworldly religious sect.) How do Pilgrims fit into American history and religious history in general?<br /><br />How low the founders of our national myth have fallen. Nineteenth-century Protestants celebrated the Pilgrims as hearty, pure-of-heart forbearers. Yet even in the 19th century Pilgrims had their share of detractors. Eli Thayer, the Kansas prophet, and the Unitarian minister Edward Everett Hale fussed about the place of Pilgrims in American history. <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=ijIUAAAAYAAJ&amp;pg=PA69&amp;dq=%22fled+from+oppression,+and+sought&amp;lr=&amp;ei=FuUKS8miKJSGzQT_5Zy4Dw#v=onepage&amp;q=%22fled%20from%20oppression%2C%20and%20sought&amp;f=false" target="_blank">Every lowly Kansan</a> (which I proudly count myself among) had more grit and determination and was more deserving of panegyrics than were the not-all-that-great Pilgrims.<br /><br /><a name='more'></a>In <a href="http://www.online-literature.com/twain/2834/" target="_blank">1881, Mark Twain delivered an uproarious address</a>, in the form of a plea, to the New England Society of Philadelphia. Why all this “laudation and hosannaing” about the Pilgrims? he asked his audience. “The Pilgrims were a simple and ignorant race. They never had seen any good rocks before, or at least any that were not watched, and so they were excusable for hopping ashore in frantic delight and clapping an iron fence around this one.” “Plymouth Rock and the Pilgrims” was a classic piece of Sam Clemens’ contrarianism. As the whole country went mad with Pilgrim fever, Twain shouted, “<a href="http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/forums/viewthread/624/">Humbug</a>!”<br /><br />Good fun. But did Twain’s comic take on those “ignorant,” “narrow” Pilgrims win the day in the 20th century? And did it win the day minus the comedy? Historian Jeremy Bangs thinks so. <a href="http://www.bu.edu/historic/hs/septemberoctober04.html#bangs" target="_blank">In 2004, he </a><a href="http://www.bu.edu/historic/hs/septemberoctober04.html#bangs" target="_blank">wrote</a>:<br /><i><br /></i> <br /><div style="margin-left: 40px;"><i>Those inspiring Pilgrims of my youth have taken a beating! According to today’s historians, the Pilgrims were among the least significant of England’s American colonists. Their tiny Plymouth Colony was soon absorbed by the larger and more prosperous Massachussets Bay. The Pilgrims were no friendlier to Indians than other Europeans in the Americas—which is to say, they were greedy, duplicitous purveyors of genocide. Nor did they invent democracy: the Mayflower Compact was just an expedient means of maintaining order in a new environment. And their first “Thanksgiving” was nothing more than a replica of a traditional, secular English harvest feast. The Pilgrims didn’t even call themselves Pilgrims, a term coined by the 19th-century Americans who invented these virtuous forbears out of thin air in an effort to grace the relatively new United States with a glorious past. Indeed, about the only aspect of my schoolboy Pilgrims that has survived this assault is their poverty.</i><br /><br /><i>The truth about the Pilgrims—and yes, I do still call them Pilgrims—is perhaps closer to the “myth” than to what we can learn from today’s textbooks.</i></div><br />So Bangs offers an erudite rebuttal to the Pilgrims' modern-day cultured despisers. His <a href="http://www.plimoth.com/books-media/books/colonial-history/strangers-and-pilgrims-travellers-and-sojourners.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-style: italic;">Strangers and Pilgrims, Travellers and Sojourners</span></a> (General Society of <a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_70Gw2abmBeI/SwtBu3bNFpI/AAAAAAAAAaQ/V4tv4FmRQ4A/s1600/bangs_book.jpg" target="_blank"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_70Gw2abmBeI/SwtBu3bNFpI/AAAAAAAAAaQ/V4tv4FmRQ4A/s320/bangs_book.jpg" style="float: right; height: 282px; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; width: 229px;" /></a>Mayflower Descendants, 2009) sets the Pilgrims in their thick historical context. His well-written scholarly account has no rival as far as scope and detail goes. The book has a whopping 894 pages and by my reckoning weighs nearly 4lbs. As a bonus, it's richly illustrated with a variety of prints and photographs (Bangs has spent much time working on the material culture of English separatists.)<br /><br />Bangs writes that Samuel Elliot Morrison, Darret Rutman, and Theodre Dwight Bozeman dismissed the Plymouth colony as insignificant, a backwater. Add to that <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDXPpfGAZrU">Malcolm X’s turn of phrase</a>: “We didn't land on Plymouth Rock, my brothers and sisters—Plymouth Rock landed on us!” (I'm not sure if <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33kveYrPoLo">Brian Wilson's immortal words count as a critique or a drug-related bit of wordplay</a>: "Rock, rock, roll, Plymouth Rock roll over . . .") Since the 1970s, a simple formula has guided much wisdom on the Pilgrims: Indians = good; Pilgrims = bad.<br /><br />Why do the Pilgrims deserve a new look? Their lives and the record they left tell us something basic about the European roots and the hot Protestant context of America’s first English settlers. The Pilgrims later significance, Bangs notes, also reveals a great deal about what future generations wanted to remember (and one might add, forget) about early colonial America. Bangs argues: “No history of the Plymouth Colony, no history of Leiden, no history of the Netherlands so far explains adequately the Pilgrims' defining experience in exile.” <span style="font-style: italic;">Travellers and Sojourners</span> “undertakes the necessary task of starting over, not simply to add incrementally to what is already known about the Pilgrims in Leiden but instead to <span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">reconceive</span></span></span> the question of who the Pilgrims were and what contributed to the choices that make them interesting historically.”Randallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16755286304057000048noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7872819010848426693.post-44657462656345331562013-11-26T08:00:00.000-05:002013-11-26T08:13:37.327-05:00How the Pilgrims Repented of Socialism and Gave Thanks[<i>This post originally appeared on November 20, 2013, on the </i><a href="http://faithandamericanhistory.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Faith and History</a> <i>blog, and is reposted here with the permission of the author</i>]<br />Robert Tracy McKenzie<br /><br />As I promised in my last post, I want to share some thoughts about Rush Limbaugh’s recent book, <i>Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims: Time-Travel Adventures with Exceptional Americans</i>. Released just three weeks ago, the book by the popular conservative radio host is now the second best-selling work on Amazon and has already elicited 470 reader reviews, nearly 90% of which are five-star raves. They praise it as a “factually correct,” “unbiased,” “true history” that will help to combat the “liberal propaganda that the children are being fed today.” (These are all comments that appear within the last twenty-four hours.)<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3SIpRPIKVHk/UpSalcH2bnI/AAAAAAAAAIU/vaYu6COEUiY/s1600/RushRevereBook1.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3SIpRPIKVHk/UpSalcH2bnI/AAAAAAAAAIU/vaYu6COEUiY/s320/RushRevereBook1.png" width="274" /></a></div>What strikes me about these responses is how utterly confident the reviewers are in the historical accuracy of a work of children’s literature that centers on the adventures of a time-traveling talking horse. There are no footnotes. No bibliography. No list of suggested readings. No evidence of any kind.<br /><br />Historical evidence, for most of us, is sort of like the foundation of a house. I remember when my wife and I were ready to buy our first home. In the back of my mind, I knew that the structure needed to rest on a firm foundation, but I didn’t waste much time thinking about it. I was a lot more concerned about floor plans and color schemes and square footage, and I remember being irritated when someone suggested that I should look underneath our dream home before buying it. (“You want me to crawl where?”) I think we tend to shop for history in much the same way. If a particular history book reinforces convictions that we already hold, it rarely enters our mind to investigate the underlying evidence. No need to go down in the crawl space when the rest of the house is so appealing.<br /><br /><a name='more'></a>When it comes to the use of evidence, <i>Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims</i> is simply a train wreck. I don’t say this gleefully, or with a sneer of condescension. Indeed, I say this as a political conservative who shares the author’s appreciation for the wisdom of our founders. I just wish he hadn’t botched the job so badly. The book may be entertaining–it may even inspire some young readers to want to learn more about their national heritage–but it fundamentally misrepresents the “Brave Pilgrims” it purports to honor.<br /><br />As Christian historian Beth Schweiger puts it so eloquently, “in history, the call to love one’s neighbor is extended to the dead.” The figures we study from the past were image bearers like us. They had their own way of looking at life–their own hopes, dreams, values, and aspirations–and when we ignore the complexity of their world to further neat-and-tidy answers in our own, we treat them as cardboard props rather than dealing with them seriously as human beings. Put simply, we are not <i>loving</i> them but <i>using</i> them. <i>Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims</i> does this in spades. I could offer numerous examples of what I have in mind, but for now I’ll just concentrate on one: Limbaugh’s characterization of the Pilgrim’s economic values.<br /><br />First, some background. Four centuries ago, the proposal to relocate a hundred people across an ocean to an uncharted continent was almost recklessly audacious. It was also prohibitively expensive, and most of the Leiden Separatists who were committed to the venture were also as poor as church mice. To succeed, it was imperative that they find financial backers who would bankroll the undertaking, and the company of London merchants who agreed to do so were no philanthropists. They were hard-headed businessmen who drove a hard bargain. And so, in exchange for the considerable cost of transporting the Pilgrims to North America and supplying them until they could provide for themselves, the Pilgrims agreed to work for the London financiers for seven years. During that time, under the terms of their agreement, everything they produced and everything they constructed (even including the houses they slept in) would belong to the company, not to them individually. At the end of the seven years, any revenue that had been generated in excess of their debts was to be divided among the London investors and the Pilgrim settlers.<br /><br />Next comes a crucial plot twist: According to governor William Bradford’s history <i>Of Plymouth Plantation</i>, in the spring of 1623 the surviving Pilgrim colonists began to debate among themselves whether there was anything they could do to improve the next year’s crop. The answer, after considerable debate, was to allocate to every household a small quantity of land (initially, one acre per person) to cultivate as their own during the coming season. Because the land varied considerably in quality, the plots were assigned by lot, with the understanding that there would be a drawing the next year and the next after that, etc., so that the land each family was assigned would change annually.<br /><br />While under the old scheme individual workers had minimal incentive to put forth extra effort (since the fruit of that effort would be divided among all, including the slackers), the new plan, according to Bradford, “made all hands very industrious.” The only flaw was the decision to reallocate household plots annually, for this discouraged families from making long-term improvements to their assigned tracts. To rectify that, Bradford explains, in the spring of 1624 it was decided to make the allocations permanent. The success of the new plan, the governor ruminated, demonstrated “the vanity of that conceit of Plato’s and other ancients applauded by some of later times; that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God.”<br /><br />This shift in economic organization looms large in how Limbaugh remembers the Pilgrims’ story, and he has been struck by it for at least two decades. I can say this with confidence because the talk show host also paid attention to the Pilgrims in his 1993 polemic <i>See, I Told You So</i>. In a chapter tellingly titled “Dead White Guys or What Your History Books Never Told You,” Limbaugh explained how “long before Karl Marx was even born” the Pilgrims had experimented with socialism and it hadn’t worked! “So what did Bradford’s community try next?” Limbaugh asks. “They unharnessed the power of good old free enterprise by invoking the undergirding capitalistic principle of private property.” And what was the result? “In no time the Pilgrims . . . had more food than they could eat themselves.” They began trading their surplus with the surrounding Indians, and “the profits allowed them to pay off their debts to the merchants in London.” In sum, the free market had triumphed.<br /><br /><i>See, I Told You So</i> never refers to the first Thanksgiving, but twenty years later, in <i>Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims</i>, Limbaugh claims that the Pilgrims’ celebration would never have occurred had they not abandoned their socialistic experiment. As a literary device, Limbaugh has Rush Revere and his talking horse, Liberty, time-travel repeatedly between the present and the winter of 1620-1621. (They are accompanied by two of Revere’s middle-school students–a trouble-making boy named Tommy and a Native American girl named Freedom.) In late December 1620, the time travelers pay a visit to the Pilgrims shortly after their arrival in New England and are surprised to learn that they plan on holding all property in common. “We are trying to create a fair and equal society,” William Bradford explains to them. “But is that freedom?” Rush Revere muses to himself.<br /><br />They return three months later, in March 1621, and are discouraged to see that the settlement is not prospering. William Bradford is perplexed; he had thought that centralized economic controls “should guarantee our prosperity and success. . . . But recently I’m beginning to doubt whether everyone will work their hardest on something that is not their own.” At this point, young Tommy relates to Bradford how hard his mother works to win prizes at the county fair, prompting the Pilgrim governor to speculate whether giving each family their own plot of land might motivate the Pilgrims to work harder and be more creative. In an epiphany, Bradford realizes that “a little competition could be healthy!” “Brilliant!” Rush Revere responds. The rest, as they say, is history.&nbsp; <br /><br />When the time travelers return that autumn–having received a personal invitation to the “First Annual Plimoth Plantation Harvest Festival”–everything is changed. “Everyone seems so joyous,” Rush Revere observes, “far different than a short while ago.” Governor Bradford explains that “we all have so much to be grateful for.“ The turning point “came when every family was assigned its own plot of land to work.” Underscoring the point, the Pilgrims’ Native American friend, Squanto, explains, “William is a smart man. . . . He gave people their own land. He made people free.” Not only that, Bradford adds, but the profits they are now generating will “soon allow us to pay back the people that sponsored our voyage to America.” Yes, there was a great deal to be thankful for. But as Rush Revere notes as the time travelers are preparing to leave, “It was obvious that this first Thanksgiving wouldn’t be possible if William Bradford hadn’t boldly changed the way the Pilgrims worked and lived.”<br /><br />The history lesson in <i>Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims</i> is clear: The Pilgrims’ First Thanksgiving had nothing to do with the Lord’s granting of a bounteous harvest after a cruel and heart-wrenching winter. Instead, they celebrated because God had delivered them from the futility of socialism. As Limbaugh put it two decades ago, “Can you think of a more important lesson one could derive from the Pilgrim experience?”<br /><br />There is just one problem: <b><i>it’s not true</i></b>. Oh, the Pilgrims undoubtedly moved toward the private ownership of property, but they did so in 1624, according to William Bradford, three crop years AFTER their autumn celebration in 1621. To make the movement toward private property the necessary precondition for the First Thanksgiving is, historically speaking, a real whopper. To use a pejorative label that the radio personality is fond of wielding, this is <b><i>revisionist </i></b>history with a vengeance!<br /><br />But there is more amiss here than a chronological gaffe. When the Pilgrims did move toward the private ownership of property, the shift was not quite the unbridled endorsement of free market competition that Limbaugh would have us believe. Nearly two centuries ago, the brilliant conservative Alexis de Tocqueville observed that “a false but clear and precise idea always has more power in the world than one which is true but complex.” Limbaugh’s characterization of the Pilgrims’ economic shift is clear, precise . . . and false. The reality is complex.<br /><br />On a visit to Plymouth at the very end of 1621, deacon Robert Cushman (a church official in the Leiden congregation) was invited to preach to the Pilgrims and chose for his text I Corinthians 10:24: “Let no man seek his own: but every man another’s wealth.” The decision to allow each household to work its own individual plot represented a movement away from this ideal–but only partially. Both Bradford and his assistant Edward Winslow described the shift not as a good thing, in and of itself, but as a concession to human weakness. It was an acknowledgment, in Winslow’s words, of “that self-love wherewith every man, in a measure more or less, loveth and preferreth his own good before his neighbor’s.” Because “all men have this corruption in them,” as Bradford put it, it was prudent to take this aspect of human nature into account.<br /><br />This was still a century and a half, however, before Adam Smith’s<i> Wealth of Nations</i> would celebrate the enlightened pursuit of self-interest as the surest way to promote the general welfare. In countless ways, the Pilgrims showed that they still belonged to an earlier age. In economics, as in all of life, they viewed liberty as the freedom to do unto others only as they would be done by. The golden rule meant that there were numerous instances in which producers must deny themselves rather than seek to maximize profit, and if they were unwilling to police their behavior voluntarily, the colony’s legislature was willing to coerce them.<br /><br />Examples abound. The<i> Laws of the Colony of New Plymouth</i> reveal that producers were prohibited from selling to distant customers if doing so created a shortage among their neighbors. Under the laws of Plymouth, it was illegal to export finished lumber under any conditions, and farmers could only sell scarce foodstuffs (corn, peas, and beans) outside of the colony with the express permission of the colonial government. Similarly, one of the very first laws recorded in Plymouth’s records prohibited skilled craftsmen from working for “foreigners or strangers till such time as the necessity of the colony be served.”<br /><br />Nor was it acceptable to gouge their neighbors by selling products or services for more than they were intrinsically worth. The colonial government passed laws regulating the price that millers charged, the fares ferrymen imposed, the wage rate of daily laborers, and the ever-important price of beer. Pilgrim Stephen Hopkins ran afoul of the latter, and was called before a grand jury for selling one-penny beer at twice the going rate. A few years later, a colonist named John Barnes was charged with buying grain at four shillings a bushel which he then sold at five, “without adventure or long forbearance.” He had not assumed a significant risk in the transaction, in other words, nor held the grain for a considerable period of time, and under the circumstances he had no right to a 25 percent profit, even if a buyer was willing to meet his price. In sum, there was nothing intrinsically moral about what the market would bear.<br /><br />And what of Limbaugh’s claim that the Pilgrims’ shift toward free enterprise would enable them “soon” to repay the company that had sponsored them? This assertion, at least, is correct, if by “soon” Limbaugh meant twenty-eight years, which, according to William Bradford is how long it took the Pilgrims to erase their debts. In truth, the assertion is misleading in the extreme.<br /><br />So where does this leave us? Before anyone concludes that I am a closet communist, I will say again that I am politically conservative. What is more, the fact that Limbaugh is badly in error about the Pilgrims does not, in itself, discredit his economic views. We don’t automatically have to follow the Pilgrims’ lead in this or any other area of life; God has granted them no authority over us. They didn’t celebrate Christmas, wear jewelry, or believe in church weddings, and I have no qualms whatsoever in choosing not to follow their example in such matters.<br /><br />But I do feel compelled to call Limbaugh to account for such an egregious misrepresentation. As a historian, I think no good cause is ever served by distorting the past, whether intentionally or accidentally. And as a Christian historian, I am grieved that the Pilgrims’ timeless example of perseverance and heavenly hope amidst unspeakable hardship has been obscured, their faith in God overshadowed by their purported faith in the free market. <br /><br /><i>Robert Tracy McKenzie is professor and chair of the department of history at Wheaton College. His most recent book is</i> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-First-Thanksgiving-Learning-History/dp/0830825746" target="_blank">The First Thanksgiving: What the Real Story Tells Us about Loving God and Learning from History <i>(InterVarsity Press, 2013)</i></a><i>.</i>Joseph Lucashttps://plus.google.com/105354394351388874296noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7872819010848426693.post-90625737602721386672013-11-25T09:56:00.002-05:002013-11-25T09:56:52.851-05:00Undergraduate Competency for History Students<div><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;">Dana Hamlin</span></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;">The History Section of the Reference and User Services Association (</span><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">RUSA) </span>of the American Library Association, recently announced that the association's Board of Directors approved a set of <a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-01jN-Mz2ylk/UpNkzKNLhZI/AAAAAAAAF4s/rsipTxHJ-bQ/s1600/IMG_0011eee.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="227" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-01jN-Mz2ylk/UpNkzKNLhZI/AAAAAAAAF4s/rsipTxHJ-bQ/s320/IMG_0011eee.jpg" width="320" /></a>information literacy <a href="http://www.ala.org/rusa/resources/guidelines/infoliteracy">guidelines and competencies for undergraduate history students</a>. A project more than four years in the making, these guidelines were developed by a committee of reference and instruction librarians, the majority of whom are subject specialists in history.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">One of the members of the committee writes </span>in an email sent to various history- and library-related listservs: "it is [the committee's] hope that the Guidelines will be used by librarians, archivists, and teaching faculty to guide teaching and learning throughout the undergraduate curriculum." Indeed, the introduction to the guidelines states that the document is intended to "provide a framework for faculty and librarians to assess [students' historical research] skills" and to "aid faculty in designing research methods classes, assignments, and projects," among other goals.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;">As someone who is part of the library/archives world and who has never taught history, I'm really curious about what the readers of this blog think about these guidelines. Are they helpful? Does a set of guidelines like this already exist in the teaching sector? Do you think this document has the potential to aid collaboration between history faculty and librarians?</span>Randallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16755286304057000048noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7872819010848426693.post-46385063335925922842013-11-22T10:05:00.000-05:002013-11-22T10:17:14.336-05:00Umbrella ManEdward H. Miller<br /><br />At 12:30 PM on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas—just as Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots into the presidential limousine—Louis Steven Witt stood on the sidewalk of Elm Street as the presidential motorcade passed. Witt was doing something that many of us would consider peculiar. He carried a large black umbrella opened widely as the sun shined brightly in the Texas sky. In Abraham <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JMBjNrDMLfE/Uo9wLMhaFZI/AAAAAAAAAH4/3_mPZVAL9RE/s1600/umbrella2.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="257" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JMBjNrDMLfE/Uo9wLMhaFZI/AAAAAAAAAH4/3_mPZVAL9RE/s400/umbrella2.gif" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Umbrella Man at far left of photo.</td></tr></tbody></table>Zapruder’s famous twenty-six second film that captured the assassination, Witt’s umbrella can be seen just as the limousine, having briefly been obstructed by a freeway sign, reappears and President Kennedy suddenly grasps for his throat. In the years following the tragedy, assassination theorists produced several outlandish accounts of what Witt—the Umbrella Man, as they named him—was actually doing. Some posited that Witt was a signalman for the supposedly numerous gunmen in Dealey Plaza that day. Another equally preposterous explanation was that the umbrella itself fired a dart, rendering the president frozen for the kill shot. Witt’s umbrella actually exemplified a common form of protest by the far Right, which was strong in Dallas in the 1950s and 1960s. The umbrella was meant to disparage any policy that involved compromise by invoking the memory of England’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (who always carried an umbrella) and the failed policy of appeasement that he championed against Hitler at the Munich Conference in 1938.[1]<br /><br /><a name='more'></a>Umbrella protests first began in England after Chamberlain arrived home from the conference carrying his trademark accessory. Wherever Chamberlain traveled, the opposition party in Britain protested his appeasement at Munich by displaying umbrellas. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Americans on the<br /><div style="text-align: left;"></div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Pet8OCPlkbw/Uo9whc9PmTI/AAAAAAAAAIA/4UMQulQFi6Q/s1600/jfk100chamberlain-angus.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="301" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Pet8OCPlkbw/Uo9whc9PmTI/AAAAAAAAAIA/4UMQulQFi6Q/s400/jfk100chamberlain-angus.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Neville Chamberlain and his umbrella.</td></tr></tbody></table>far Right employed umbrellas to criticize leaders supposedly appeasing the enemies of the United States. Some politicians even refused to use them for that reason. Vice President Richard Nixon banned his own aides from carrying umbrellas when picking him up at the airport for fear of being photographed and charged as an appeaser.[2]&nbsp;Returning from the Geneva Conference in 1955, President Eisenhower had to give a speech in the pouring rain because Nixon had prohibited presidential assistants from carrying umbrellas.[3] Campaigning against Adlai Stevenson, Eisenhower’s opponent in 1952 and 1956, Nixon declared, “If the umbrella is the symbol of appeasement, then Adlai Stevenson must go down in history as the Umbrella Man of all time.”[4] When the Berlin Wall was constructed in 1961 and President Kennedy did not send American troops to tear it down, German students, as well as many Americans, sent him umbrellas.[5] Upon returning home after having established new cultural and commercial ties with China in the 1970s, President Richard Nixon was met with umbrella-wielding students, who shared William F. Buckley’s assertion that Nixon had “sold out” by meeting with the leaders of the Communist dictatorship.<br /><br />While it is clear that many have been tagged as umbrella men over the years, Dallas’s Louis Steven Witt said that his real target of his protest was Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., the ambassador to England at the time of the Munich agreement and whose support of Chamberlain was well known. Appearing before the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978, Witt explained that being a&nbsp;“conservative-type fellow” and, having heard from a work colleague that the umbrella was a&nbsp;“sore spot”&nbsp;for President Kennedy (because his father had been criticized intensely), he had wanted&nbsp;“to heckle the President’s motorcade” and thought the umbrella would do the job.[6]<br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wc99YoZQKVg/Uo9w4faRBiI/AAAAAAAAAII/gOM0m-kXT8U/s1600/100witt-hsca.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wc99YoZQKVg/Uo9w4faRBiI/AAAAAAAAAII/gOM0m-kXT8U/s1600/100witt-hsca.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Louis Steven Witt testifying in 1978.</td></tr></tbody></table><br />Witt’s explanation is plausible, but what really matters is how others <i>understood</i> his actions that morning. If we consider the historical context—Dallas’s status as a redoubt of the far Right and the flurry of newspaper articles in Ted Dealey’s <i>Dallas Morning News </i>comparing Kennedy to Chamberlain and the 1963 Test Ban Treaty to the Munich agreement—it is likely that Witt’s umbrella was at least perceived by the crowd around him as a protest of President Kennedy’s nuclear disarmament policy. “Kennedy acts like Neville Chamberlain,” observed one letter to the editor in March 1963.[7] Another reader wrote in August 1963 that the “dissolution of the British Empire started at Munich with Neville Chamberlain, that of the United States in January, 1961, with the Kennedy regime.”[8] Another Dallasite, W.E. Parks, wrote in 1963: “the nuclear-test-ban treaty . . . is the Chamberlain-Hitler ‘peace in our time’ pact with a new cast and new lines.”[9] In an editorial on September 9, 1963, the <i>Dallas Morning News</i> drew what it called “parallels between the Munich agreement and the current U.S.-British-Soviet test-ban treaty.” Suggesting that President Kennedy was another Neville Chamberlain, the <i>News</i> observed, there “is no more encouragement today for believing that the Soviets have changed their aggressive intentions than there was to believe the Nazis had changed their goals in 1938.”[10] <br /><br />The incident illustrates the potency and ubiquity of far Right ideas in Dallas in 1963. Elements of this worldview extended into different aspects of everyday behavior, sometimes even when ordinary moments turned into extraordinary events.<br /><br /><i>Edward H. Miller received his Ph.D. in History from Boston College. His manuscript, Into Nut Country: Dallas Republicans, the Southern Strategy, and the American Right, 1952-1964, is currently under review by the University of Chicago Press. Miller currently is an adjunct professor at Northeastern University.&nbsp;</i><br /><br />NOTES<br />[1]&nbsp;Attesting to the umbrella’s popularity as a sign on the Right in the 1960s, Todd Gitlin writes, “In one corner, right-wingers from Young Americans for Freedom hoisted black umbrellas, intimating that we were Munich-minded equivalents of Neville Chamberlain, and hissed sporadically throughout the evening.” <i>The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage </i>(Bantam Books, 1987), 99. <br /><br />[2]&nbsp;Richard Reeves,<i> President Nixon: Alone in the White House</i>&nbsp;(Simon &amp; Schuster, 2001), 468; &nbsp;Geoffrey M. Kabaservice, <i>Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party</i> (Oxford University Press, 2012), 100; and Neil A. Hamilton, <i>The 1970s</i> (Facts On File, 2006), 87.<br /><br />[3] Ira Chernus, <i>Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace </i>(Texas A&amp;M University Press, 2002), 90.<br /><br />[4]&nbsp;Kevin Mattson, <i>Just Plain Dick: Richard Nixon’s Checkers Speech and the “Rocking, Socking” Election of 1952</i> (Bloomsbury, 2012), 168.<br /><br />[5] Thomas G. Paterson, <i>Kennedy’s Quest for Victory: American Foreign Policy, 1961–1963</i> (Oxford University Press, 1989), 42.<br /><br />[6]&nbsp;<i>Dallas Morning News</i>, September 24, 1978; September 26, 1978.<br /><br />[7] Ibid.,&nbsp;March 24, 1963.<br /><br />[8]&nbsp;Ibid., August 12, 1963.<br /><br />[9]&nbsp;Ibid., August 5, 1963.<br /><br />[10]&nbsp;Ibid., September 13, 1963.<br /><br /><br />Joseph Lucashttps://plus.google.com/105354394351388874296noreply@blogger.com6